In Defense Of Reason

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IN DEI-ENSE Ol: REASON

BOOKS BY YVOR WINTERS
CRITICISM

Primitivism and Decadence

Maule's Curse
The Anatomy of Nonsense
The Function of Criticism

POETRY

The Immobile Wind

The Magpie's Shadow

The Bare Hills

The Proof

The Journey

Before Disaster

Poems

The Giant Weapon
Collected Poems

EDIT O R

Twelve Poets ot the Pacific
Twelve Poets of the Pacific: Second Scries

IN DEFENSE OF

REASON

PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE:
A Study of American Experimental Poetry

MAULE'S CURSE:
Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism

j

THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BRIDGE by Hart Crane,
or What Are We to Think of Professor X?

BY

Yvor Winters

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD

Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane

London, E.C-4

Third edition

COPYRIGHT, 1937, 1947,

BY YVOR WINTERS

COPYRIGHT, 1938, 1943,
BY NEW DIRECTIONS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

NOTE

MOST OF THE ESSAYS in this volume are reprinted from earlier
books: From Primitivism and Decadence (Arrow Editions,
1937) The Morality of Poetry, The Experimental School, Poetic
Convention, Primitivism and Decadence, and The Influence of
Meter on Poetic Convention; from Maules Curse (New Direc-
tions, 1938) Maule's Curse, Fenimore Cooper, Herman Mel-
ville, Edgar Allan Poe, Jones Very and R. W. Emerson, Emily
Dickinson, and Maule's Well; from The Anatomy of Nonsense
(New Directions, 1943) Preliminary Problems, Henry Adams,
Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, and Post
Scripta.

Acknowledgment should be made also to the following mag-
azines, in which some of this material appeared originally: The
Hound and Horn, Poetry, American Literature, The American
Review, and The Kenyon Review.

CONTENTS

PAGE

A FOREWORD 3

PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE: A Study of American

Experimental Poetry 15

The Morality of Poetry 17

The Experimental Sehool in American Thought 30

Poetic Convention 75

Primitivism and Decadence 90

The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention 103

MAULE'S CURSE: Seven Studies in the History of Ameri-
can Obscurantism 151
A Foreword 153
Maule's Curse, or Hawthorne and the Problem of

Allegory 157
Fcnimorc Cooper, or the Ruins of Time 176
Herman Melville, and the Problems of Moral Navi-
gation 200
Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American

Obscurantism 234
Jones Very and R. W. Emerson : Aspects of New Eng-
land Mysticism 262
Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Judgment 283
Maule's Well, or Henry James and the Relation of

Morals to Manners 300

A Brief Selection of the Poems of Jones Very 344

THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE 359

Preliminary Problems 361

I Icnry Adams, or the Creation of Confusion 374

Wallace Stevens, or the Hedonist's Progress 431

T. S. Eliot, or the Illusion of Reaction 460

vii

PAGE

John Crowe Ransom, or Thunder Without God 502

Post Scripta 556

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BRIDGE by Hart Crane,
or What Are We to Think of Professor X? 575

INDEX OF AUTHORS MENTIONED 605

vm

IN DEFENSE OF REASON

A FOREWORD

THE ESSAYS NOW REPRINTED in this volume are the work of more
than fifteen years. Although this collection, like any collection
of essays, suffers from its miscellaneous character, there is a
single theory of literature developed throughout and a single
theory of the history of literature since the Renaissance. These
theories are developed mainly with reference to American litera-
ture. It may be of some service to the reader if I recapitulate
briefly.

There have been various ideas regarding the nature and func-
tion of literature during the twenty-five hundred years or so that
literature has been seriously discussed. One might think, off-
hand, that the possibilities were limitless; but they are actually
limited and even narrowly limited— the ideas are all classifiable
under a fairly small number of headings. I shall not attempt an
historical survey but shall merely attempt a brief classificatory
survey. The theories in question can all be classified, I believe,
under three headings: the didactic, the hedonistic, and the ro-
mantic. I am not in sympathy with any of these, but with a
fourth, which for lack of a better term I call the moralistic. This
concept of literature has not been adequately defined in the past
so far as my limited knowledge extends, but I believe that it has
been loosely implicit in the inexact theorizing which has led to
the most durable judgments in the history of criticism.

The didactic theory of literature is simple; it is this: that
literature offers us useful precepts and explicit moral instruction.
If the theory is sound, then literature is useful; but the question
arises as to whether there may not be other fields of study, such

3

as religion or ethics, which may accomplish the same end more
efficiently. The question is usually met by the Horatian formula,
which combines the didactic with the hedonistic, telling us that
the function of literature is to provide instruction (or profit) in
conjunction with pleasure, to make instruction palatable. Of this
I shall say more later. There arises another question in connec-
tion with the didactic theory: can one say, as someone— I believe
it was Kenneth Burke— has remarked, that Hamlet was written
to prove that procrastination is the thief of time, or to prove
something comparably simple? Or is there more than that to
Hamlet? And if there is more, is it worth anything? It seems
obvious to me that there is more and that it is worth a great deal,
that the paraphrasable content of the work is never equal to the
work, and that our theory of literature must account not only for
the paraphrasable content but for the work itself. The didactic
theory of literature fails to do this.

The hedonist sees pleasure as. the end of life, and literature
either as a heightener of pleasure or as the purveyor of a particu-
lar and mdre or less esoteric variety of pleasure. The term pleas-
ure is applied indiscriminately to widely varying experiences : we
say, for example, that we derive pleasure from a glass of good
whisky and that we derive pleasure from reading Hamlet. The
word is thus misleading, for it designates two experiences here
which have little relationship to each other. There is a great
range in the kinds of pleasure advocated in various hedonistic
philosophies, but in general one might remark this defect which
is common to nearly all, perhaps to all, such systems: pleasure
is treated as an end in itself, not as a by-product of something
else. If we recognize that certain feelings which are loosely
classifiable as forms of pleasure result from our recognition of
various kinds of truth and from the proper functioning of our
natures in the process of this recognition, we then have a princi-
ple which may enable us to distinguish these pleasures from
pleasures less important or less desirable, such as the pleasures
or satisfactions which we derive from the gratification of physical
appetites or from the excitement of stimulants, and a principle
which may even enable us to evaluate relatively to each other the

higher pleasures themselves. But pleasure then becomes inciden-
tal and not primary, and our system can no longer be classified as
properly hedonistic. Furthermore, there is this distinction at least
between hedonistic ethics and hedonistic aesthetics: hedonistic
ethics, as in the philosophy of Epicurus, may take on a somewhat
passive or negativistic character; that is pleasure may come to be
more or less nearly identified simply with the avoidance of pain.
But one cannot praise a poem or a picture merely by saying that
it gives no pain: the experience of the poem or of the picture
must be strongly positive. Hedonistic theories of literature tend
in the main, and this is especially true in the past two hundred
years, to take one of two forms.

The first might be connected with the name of Walter Pater.
According to this view there is a close relation between hedo-
nistic ethics and hedonistic aesthetics. Pleasure is the aim of life.
Pleasure consists in intensity of experience; that is in the culti-
vation of the feelings for their own sake, as a good in themselves.
And literature, or at any rate the arts in general, can provide a
finer technique of such cultivation than can any other mode of
activity. We meet here the first difficulty which I mentioned in
connection with hedonistic doctrines; namely, that unless we
have illicit relations with some non-hedonistic ethical theory, we
have no way of distinguishing among the many and diverse
excitements that are commonly described as pleasurable. And
we shall discover, as a matter of human nature which is recorded
in the history of literature and the other arts, that this search
for intensity of experience leads inevitably to an endless pursuit
either of increasing degrees of violence of emotion or of increas-
ingly elusive and more nearly meaningless nuances, and ulti-
mately to disillusionment with art and with life. It is possible,
of course, that art and life are really worthless, but on the other
hand it is possible that they are valuable. And until we have
made sure that our hedonistic theory offers a true description of
human experience, that no better description is possible, we
should be unwise to commit ourselves to it, for the ultimate
consequences appear both certain and unfortunate.

The second form of hedonistic theory tends to dissociate the

5

artistic experience sharply from all other experience, T. S. Eliot,
for example, tells us that the human experience about which the
poem appears to be written has been transmuted in the aesthetic
process into something new which is different in kind from all
other experience. The poem is not then, as it superficially ap-
pears, a statement about a human experience, but is a thing in
itself. The beginnings of this notion are to be found in Poe and
are developed further by the French Symbolists, notably by Mal-
Iarm6. The aim of the poem so conceived is again pleasure,
pleasure conceived as intensity of emotion; but the emotion is
of an absolutely special sort. Some such notion of the artistic ex-
perience is the essential concept of Santayana's aesthetics; in
fact, it is essential to almost any treatment of "aesthetics" as a
branch of philosophy, and one will find it everywhere in the
work of the academic aestheticians of the past half-century. The
nature of the "aesthetic" experience as conceived in these terms
has never been clearly defined; we commonly meet here a kind
of pseudcNmysticism. The chief advantage of this kind of hedon-
ism over the Paterian variety is that one can adhere to it without
adhering to a doctrine of ethical hedonism, for art and lift- arc
absolutely severed from each other. Eliot, for example, considers
himself a Christian. The chief disadvantage is that it renders in-
telligible discussion of art impossible, and it relegates art to the
position of an esoteric indulgence, possibly though not certainly
harmless, but hardly of sufficient importance to merit a high
position among other human activities. Art, however, has always
been accorded a high position, and a true theory of art should
be able to account for this fact.

Certain theorists who have been aware that art is more than
moral precept on the one hand and more than a search for culti-
vated excitement on the other have tried to account for its com-
plexity by combining the didactic and the hedonistic theories:
this gives us the Horatian formula, that art combines profit with
pleasure. When this formula occurs, as it often does, in the writ-
ing of a great poet or of some other person who takes his poetry
seriously, it apparently represents a somewhat rough and ready
recognition of the fact that poetry has intellectual content and
6

something more; that its power is real and cannot be accounted
for too easily. But if one regard the doctrine itself, and regard
it as pure theory, it is unsatisfactory; or at any rate it relegates
art to an unsatisfactory position. For the didactic element in art
so conceived will be no more efficient as didacticism than we
have seen it to be before: that is, the serious moralist may quite
reasonably argue that he prefers to get his teaching in a more
direct and compact form; and the pleasure is still in the unhappy
predicament in which we found it in the purely hedonistic
theory.

The Romantic theory of literature takes account more seri-
ously than the theories which I have thus far mentioned of the
power which literature seems to exert over human nature, and
to that extent offers a more realistic view of literature. I am con-
cerned with literature which may be loosely described as artistic:
that is, with literature which communicates not only thought
but also emotion. I do not like the expression imaginative lit-
erature, for in its colloquial acceptation the phrase excludes too
much: it excludes the persuasive and hortatory, for example, the
sermon and the political tract; and imagination as a term of so-
phisticated criticism has been used so variously and so elusively,
especially during the past hundred and fifty years, that I am not
quite sure what it means. But the power of artistic literature is
real: if we consider such writers as Plato, Augustine, Dante,
Shakespeare, Rousseau, Voltaire, Emerson, and Hitler, to go no
further, we must be aware that such literature has been directly
and indirectly one of the greatest forces in human history. The
Gospels gave a new direction to half the world; Mem Kampf
very nearly reversed that direction. The influence of Rimbaud
and of Mallarm£ is quite as real but has operated more slowly
and with less of obvious violence. It behooves us to discover the
nature of artistic literature, what it does, how it does it, and how
one may evaluate it. It is one of the facts of life, and quite as
important a fact as atomic fission. In our universities at present,
for example, one or another of the hedonistic views of literature
will be found to dominate, although often colored by Romantic
ideas, with the result that the professors of literature, who for

7

the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor
defence of their profession, and the professors of science, who are
frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and
education, feel a politely disguised contempt for it; and thus the
study of one of the most pervasive and powerful influences on
human life is traduced and neglected.

The Romantics, however, although they offer a relatively real-
istic view of the power of literature, offer a fallacious and danger-
ous view of the nature both of literature and of man. The Ro-
mantic theory assumes that literature is mainly or even purely
an emotional experience, that man is naturally good, that man's
impulses are trustworthy, that the rational faculty is unreliable
to the point of being dangerous or possibly evil. The Romantic
theory of human nature teaches that if man will rely upon his
impulses, he will achieve the good life. When this notion is
combined, as it frequently is, with a pantheistic philosophy or
religion, it commonly teaches that through surrender to im-
pulse man will not only achieve the good life but will achieve
also a kind of mystical union with the Divinity: this, for ex-
ample, is the doctrine of Emerson. Literature thus becomes a
form of what is known popularly as self-expression. It is not the
business of man to understand and improve himself, for such an
effort is superfluous: he is good as he is, if he will only let him-
self alone, or, as we might say, let himself go. The poem is
valuable because it enables us to share the experience of a man
who has let himself go, who has expressed his feelings, without
hindrance, as he has found them at a given moment. The ulti-
mate ideal at which such a theory aims is automatism. There is
nothing in the theory to provide a check on such automatism; if
the individual man is restrained by some streak of personal but
unformulated common sense, by some framework of habit de-
rived from a contrary doctrine, such as Christian doctrine, or by
something in his biological inheritance, that is merely his good
fortune— the Romantic doctrine itself will not restrain him. The
Romantic doctrine itself will urge him toward automatism. And
the study of history seems to show that if any doctrine is widely
accepted for a long period of time, it tends more and more strongly
8

to exact conformity from human nature, to alter human nature.
The Romantic theory of literature and of human nature has been
the dominant theory in western civilization for about two and
a half centuries. Its influence is obviously disastrous in litera-
ture and is already dangerous in other departments of human life.

There are certain other general notions of human nature and
of values which are related to the notions which I have been
discussing, but which are not exactly correlative with them. I
shall refer to them rather baldly as determinism, relativism, and
absolutism.

Determinism is that theory of the universe which holds that
the whole is a single organism, pursuing a single and undeviat-
ing course which has been predestined by God or determined by
its own nature. It sees the human being simply as a part of this
organism, with no independent force of his own. One must dis-
tinguish sharply between a deterministic theory and a theory
which recognizes the real existence of influences outside of the
individual, whether those influences be historical, biological, or
other. One may even take a pessimistic view of such influences
without being a determinist. If one admits that man may under-
stand in some measure the conditions of his existence, that as
a result of such understanding he may choose a mode of action,
that as a result of such choice he may persevere in the mode of
action chosen, and that as a result of his perseverance he may in
some measure alter the conditions of his existence, then one is
not a determinist. Few people who profess deterministic doc-
trines are willing to envisage clearly their implications, how-
ever. As a result, one will find all three of the views of poetry
which I have mentioned held by determinists.

It is natural that deterministic and Romantic theories should
coincide, for Romanticism teaches the infinite desirability of
automatism, and determinism teaches the inevitability of autom-
atism. Determinism is Romanticism in a disillusioned mood;
Henry Adams is little more than the obverse side of Emerson,
the dark side of the moon. And since hedonism is, like deter-
minism, an anti-intellectualistic philosophy and is somewhat
vague in all its tenets, it is not surprising that determinists should

sometimes appear as hedonists: since they cannot control in any
measure the courses of their lives, the determinists sometimes
find solace in seeking pleasure along the way, without stopping
to consider that such a search is a willful activity involving at
least limited consideration and choice. It is curious that the
didactic view of literature should so often be adopted by deter-
minists, however, for the determinist really has no right to the
didactic method. Yet the most vigorous, one might say the most
religious, of the various species of determinist, such for example
as the Calvinists of the past and the Marxists of the present, are
commonly the most didactic of men, both in their literature and
in their behavior.

The absolutist believes in the existence of absolute truths and
values. Unless he is very foolish, he does not believe that he
personally has free access to these absolutes and that his own
judgments are final; but he does believe that such absolutes exist
and that it is the duty of every man and of every society to en-
deavor as far as may be to approximate them. The relativist, on
the other hand, believes that there are no absolute truths, that
the judgment of every man is right for himself. I am aware that
many persons believe that they have arrived at some kind of
compromise between these two positions, but actually no com-
promise is possible. Any such attempt at compromise, if closely
examined, will exhibit an ultimate allegiance to one position or
the other or else will exhibit simple confusion. It is popular at
present to profess relativism and yet in important matters to act
as if we were absolutists. Our ideas of justice, which we endeavor
to define by law and for which wars are often fought, can be
defended only by invoking moral absolutism. Our universities,
in which relativistic doctrines are widely taught, can justify
their existence only in terms of a doctrine of absolute truth. The
professor of English Literature, who believes that taste is relative,
yet who endeavors to convince his students that Hamlet is more
worthy of their attention than some currently popular novel, is
in a serious predicament, a predicament which is moral, intellec-
tual, and in the narrowest sense professional, though he com-
monly has not the wit to realize the fact.
10

The Romantic is almost inescapably a relativist, for if all men
follow their impulses there will be a wide disparity of judgments
and of actions and the fact enforces recognition. The Emer-
sonian formula is the perfect one: that is right for me which is
after my constitution; that is right for you which is after yours;
the common divinity will guide each of us in the way which is
best for him. The hedonist is usually a relativist and should logi-
cally be one, but there is often an illicit and veiled recognition of
absolutism in his attempts to classify the various pleasures as
more or less valuable, not for himself alone but in general. The
defender of the didactic view of literature has been traditionally
an absolutist, but he is not invariably so: didacticism is a method,
and when one sees literature only as didacticism one sees it as
a method, and the method may be used, as Emerson used it, to
disseminate relativistic doctrine.

The theory of literature which I defend in these essays is ab-
solutist. I believe that the work of literature, in so far as it is
valuable, approximates a real apprehension and communication
of a particular kind of objective truth. The form of literature
with which I am for the most part concerned is the poem; but
since the poem exhausts more fully than any other literary form
the inherent possibilities of language, what I say about poetry
can be extended to include other literary forms with relatively
unimportant qualifications, and in point of fact I devote con-
siderable space to other literary forms. The poem is a statement
in words about a human experience. Words are primarily con-
ceptual, but through use and because human experience is not
purely conceptual, they have acquired connotations of feeling.
The poet makes his statement in such a way as to employ both
concept and connotation as efficiently as possible. The poem is
good in so far as it makes a defensible rational statement about
a given human experience (the experience need not be real but
must be in some sense possible) and at the same time communi-
cates the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational
understanding of that experience. This notion of poetry, what-
ever its defects, will account both for the power of poetry and of
artistic literature in general on its readers and for the seriousness

II

with which the great poets have taken their art. Milton, for ex-
ample, did not write Paradise Lost to give pleasure to Professor
So-and-So, nor did he write it to give free rein to his emotions;
he wrote it in order to justify the ways of God to men, and the
justification involved not merely a statement of theory but a con-
formity of the emotional nature of man with the theory.

Poetry, and in a less definite fashion all artistic literature, in-
volves not only the two aspects of language which I have just
mentioned, but also the rhythmic and the formal. Rhythm, for
reasons which I do not wholly understand, has the power of
communicating emotion; and as a part of the poem it has the
power of qualifying the total emotion. What we speak of loosely
as the "form" of a poem is probably, at least for the most part,
two-fold: we have on the one hand the rational structure of the
poem, the orderly arrangement and progression of thought; and
we have on the other a kind of rhythm broader and less easily
measurable than the rhythm of the line— the poem exists in time,
the mind proceeds through it in time, and if the poet is a good
one he take£ advantage of this fact and makes the progression
rhythmical. These aspects of the poem will be efficient in so
far as the poet subordinates them to the total aim of the poem.

One criticism which has been made of me repeatedly is this:
that I wish to discard every poem to which I make objections.
This is not true. Probably no poem is perfect in the eye of God.
So far as I am concerned, a good many poems approach so nearly
to perfection that I find them satisfactory. But there are many
poems which seem to me obviously imperfect and even very
seriously imperfect, which I have no wish to discard. Some of
these I have analyzed both in respect to their virtues and to their
defects; others, because of the nature of my discussion, mainly
with reference to their defects; but I have dealt with few works
which do not seem to me to have discernible virtues, for to do
otherwise would seem to me a waste of time. If we were all to
emulate Hart Crane, the result would be disastrous to literature
and to civilization; it is necessary to understand the limitations
of Hart Crane, which are of the utmost seriousness; but when we
understand those limitations, we are in a position to profit by his

12

virtues with impunity, and his virtues are sometimes very great.
If we are not aware of his limitations but are sufficiently sensi-
tive to guess in some fashion at his virtues, he may easily take
possession of us wholly. This difficulty indicates the function of
criticism.

Certain poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ap-
proximates most closely the qualities which seem to me the best.
It seems to me, as it has seemed to many others, that there has
been a general deterioration of the quality of poetry since the
opening of the eighteenth century. Like many others, I have
endeavored to account for this deterioration. It would surprise
no one if I stated that Collins' Ode to Evening was an im-
perfect and secondary poem if judged in comparison with all
English poetry; but it arouses antagonism when I give reasons,
partly because there is a general dislike for reasons, and partly
because my reasons are not complimentary to the orthodoxies
of our time. I regret the antagonism, but since I believe my rea-
sons to be sound and the matter in general serious, I must main-
tain my position and take the consequences. These essays, then,
endeavor not only to defend a theory of poetry and to judge
certain writers with reference to that theory, but to outline as
far as this kind of writing permits certain historical tendencies
and the reasons for them. I do this in the hope that my efforts
may in some small measure contribute to the alteration of these
tendencies; our literary culture (to mention nothing more) ap-
pears to me to be breaking up, and the rescue of it appears to me
a matter of greater moment than the private feelings of some
minor poet or scholar.

I should perhaps call attention to one other matter in connec-
tion with my aims. It seems to me impossible to judge the value
of any idea in a vacuum. That is, the hedonistic view of litera-
ture may conceivably appear sound, or the relativistic view of
literature and morals may appear sound, if the idea is circum-
scribed by a few words. But either idea implies a fairly complete
description of a large range of human experience, and if the
description does not agree with the facts as we are forced to
recognize them, then something is wrong. I am acquainted, for

13

example, with the arguments which prove that the wall is not
there, but if I try to step through the wall, I find that the wall
is there notwithstanding the arguments. During the past century
or so, the number of poets who have endeavored to conform
their practice to the ideas which seem to me unsound has been
rather large, and we can judge the ideas more or less clearly in
the light of these experiments. A large part of this book is de-
voted to the analysis of such experiments.

Finally, I am aware that my absolutism implies a theistic posi-
tion, unfortunate as this admission may be. If experience appears
to indicate that absolute truths exist, that we are able to work
toward an approximate apprehension of them, but that they are
antecedent to our apprehension and that our apprehension is
seldom and perhaps never perfect, then there is only one place in
which those truths may be located, and I see no way to escape
this conclusion. I merely wish to point out that my critical and
moral notions are derived from the observation of literature and
of life, and that my theism is derived from my critical and moral
notions. I cjid not proceed from the opposite direction.

All of the concepts outlined briefly and incompletely in this
foreword, with the exception of that mentioned in the last para-
graph, will be found more fully explained at various points in
the present volume. These remarks are not offered as a complete
statement, but are offered merely as a guide and an introduction.

Primitivism and
Decadence:

A STUDY OF AMERICAN
EXPERIMENTAL POETRY

THE MORALITY OF POETRY

BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO ELUCIDATE or to criticize a poetry so dif-
ficult and evasive as that of the best moderns, it would appear wise
to summarize as clearly as possible those qualities for which one
looks in a poem. We may say that a poem in the first place should
offer us new perceptions, not only of the exterior universe, but of
human experience as well; it should add, in other words, to what
we have already seen. This is the elementary function for the
reader. The corresponding function for the poet is a sharpening
and training of his sensibilities; the very exigencies of the me-
dium as he employs it in the act of perception should force him
to the discovery of values which he never would have found
without the convening of all the conditions of that particular act,
conditions one or more of which will be the necessity of solving
some particular difficulty such as the location of a rhyme or the
perfection of a cadence without disturbance to the remainder of
the poem. The poet who suffers from such difficulties instead of
profiting by them is only in a rather rough sense a poet at all.

If, however, the difficulties of versification are a stimulant
merely to the poet, the reader may argue that he finds them a
hindrance to himself and that he prefers some writer of prose
who appears to offer him as much with less trouble to all con-
cerned. The answer to such a reader is that the appearance of
equal richness in the writer of prose is necessarily deceptive.

For language is a kind of abstraction, even at its most concrete;
such a word as "cat," for instance, is generic and not particular.
Such a word becomes particular only in so far as it gets into some
kind of experiential complex, which qualifies it and limits it,

which gives it, in short, a local habitation as well as a name. Such
a complex is the poetic line or other unit, which, in turn, should
be a functioning part of the larger complex, or poem. This is, I
imagine, what Mallarm6 should have had in mind when he
demanded that the poetic line be a new word, not found in any
dictionary, and partaking of the nature of incantation (that is,
having the power to materialize, or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say, Toeing, a new experience.)1

The poem, to be perfect, should likewise be a new word in the

1St6phane Mallarme*: Avant-Dire du Traite du Verbe, par Ren6 Ghil.
Giraud, 18 Rue Drouot, Paris. 1886. Actually, Mallarme" seems to have had
more in mind, though he should have had no more, in my opinion. The margin
of difference is the margin in which post-romantic theory has flourished and
from which post-romantic poetry has sprung. I quote the entire curious passage:

"Un de*sir inde*niable a re*poque est de se*parer comme en vue d'attributions
diffe*rentes, le double e*tat de la parole, brut ou immediate ici, la essentiel.

"Narrer, enseigner, m£me de"crire, cela va et encore qu'a chacun sumrait
peut-£tre, pour echanger toute pense*e humaine, de prendre ou de mettre dans
la main d'autrui en silence une piece de monnaie, 1'emploi elementaire du dis-
cours dessert Tuniversel reportage dont, la Litterature excepte"e, participe tout,
entre les genres d'ecrits contemporains.

"A quoi bon la merveille de transposer un fait de nature en sa presque dis-
parition vibratoire selon le jeu de la parole cependant, si ce n'est pour qu'on
emane, sans la g£ne d'un proche ou concret rappel, la notion pure?

"Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de 1'oubli ou ma voix relegue aucun contour, en
tant que quelque chose d'autre que les calices sus, musicalement se leve, id£e
rieuse ou altiere, 1'absente de tous bouquets.

"Au contraire d'une fonction de numeraire facile et repre*sentatif, comme le
traite d'abord la foule, le parler qui est, apres tout, reVe et chant, retrouve chez
le poete, par ne*cessit£ constitutive d'un art consacre* aux fictions, sa virtualite*.
Le vers qui de plusierus vocables refait un mot total, neuf, etranger a la
langue et comme incantatoire, acheve cet isolement de la parole: niant, d'un
trait souverain, le hasard demeure* aux termes malgre* I'artifice de leur retrempe
alterne'e en le sens et la sonorite", et vous cause cette surprise de n'avoir oui
jamais tel fragment ordinaire d'elocution, en m^me temps que la reminiscence
de Fobjet nomm^ baigne dans une clairvoyante atmosphere."

This is in some respects an admirable summary, and is certainly important
historically. The entire tendency of the passage is to encourage the elimination
of the rational from poetry. One should observe the sequence: "narrer, en-
seigner, m&me decrire," as if description were more nearly poetic than the
other activities. The word essentiel, at the end of the first paragraph is the
crux of the whole passage. The critic savs that words have an obvious (that is,
a rational) meaning, and a fringe of feeling, which he chooses to call essential:
if only one kind of content is essential, we are naturally inclined to try to
eliminate the other, and we have in this confusion, which reappears spon-
taneously, and without any discernible indebtedness to Mallarme', in each suc-
cessive generation of post-romantic poets, the real basis for post-romantic ob-
scurantism. The sound idea that a poem is more than its rational content is thus
perverted and distorted.

18

same sense, a word of which the line, as we have defined it, is
merely a syllable. Such a word is, of course, composed of much
more than the sum of its words (as one normally uses the term)
and its syntax. It is composed of an almost fluid complex, if the
adjective and the noun are not too nearly contradictory, of rela-
tionships between words (in the normal sense of the term), a
relationship involving rational content, cadences, rhymes, juxta-
positions, literary and other connotations, inversions, and so on,
almost indefinitely. These relationships, it should be obvious,
extend the poet's vocabulary incalculably. They partake of the
fluidity and unpredictability of experience and so provide a
means of treating experience with precision and freedom. If the
poet does not wish, as, actually, he seldom does, to reproduce a
given experience with approximate exactitude, he can employ the
experience as a basis for a new experience that will be just as
real, in the sense of being particular, and perhaps more valuable.

Now verse is more valuable than prose in this process for the
simple reasons that its rhythms are faster and more highly organ-
ized than are those of prose, and so lend themselves to a greater
complexity and compression of relationship, and that the inten-
sity of this convention renders possible a greater intensity of
other desirable conventions, such as poetic language and devices
of rhetoric. The writer of prose must substitute bulk for this
kind of intensity; he must define his experience ordinarily by
giving all of its past history, the narrative logic leading up to it,
whereas the experiential relations given in a good lyric poem,
though particular in themselves, are applicable without alteration
to a good many past histories. In this sense, the lyric is general
as well as particular; in fact, this quality of transferable or gen-
eralized experience might be regarded as the defining quality of
lyrical poetry.

What I have just said should make plain the difficulty of com-
prehending a poem exactly and fully; its total intention may be
very different from its paraphrasable, or purely logical content. If
one take, for example, Mr. Allen Tate's sonnet, The Subway,
and translate it into good scholarly prose, using nothing but the
rational content of the poem as a reference, one will find the

19

author saying that as a result of his ideas and of his metropolitan
environment, he is going mad. Now as a matter of fact, the poem
says nothing of the sort:

Dark accurate plunger down the successive knell
Of arch on arch, -where ogives hurst a red
Reverberance of hail upon the dead
Thunder, like an exploding crucible!
Harshly articulate, musical steel shell
Of angry worship, hurled religiously
Upon your business of humility
Into the iron forestries of hell!

Till broken in the shift of quieter

Dense altitudes tangential of your steel,

1 am become geometries— and glut

Expansions like a blind astronomer

Dazed, while the worldless heavens bulge and reel

In the cold revery of an idiot.

The sonnet indicates that the author has faced and defined the
possibility of the madness that I have mentioned (a possibility
from the consideration of which others as well as himself may
have found it impossible to escape) and has arrived at a moral
attitude toward it, an attitude which is at once defined and com-
municated by the poem. This attitude is defined only by the entire
poem, not by the logical content alone; it is a matter not only of
logical content, but of feeling as well. The feeling is particular
and unparaphrasable, but one may indicate the nature of it
briefly by saying that it is a feeling of dignity and of self-control
in the face of a situation of major difficulty, a difficulty which the
poet fully apprehends. This feeling is inseparable from what we
call poetic form, or unity, for the creation of a form is nothing
more nor less than the act of evaluating and shaping (that is,
controlling) a given experience. It should be obvious that any
attempt to reduce the rational content of such a poem would
20

tend to confuse or even to eliminate the feeling: the poem con-
sists in the relationship between the two.

To reenforce my point, I shall take the liberty of quoting an-
other poem, this one by Mr. Howard Baker, in which something
comparable occurs. The title is Pont Neuf:

Henry the Fourth rides in bronze,

His shoulders curved and pensive, thrust

Enormously into electric

Blazonments of a Christmas trust.

Children pass him aghast and pleased,
Reflective of the ftickerings
Of jerky hears and clowns. Alone,
Astute to all the bickerings

Of age and death rides Henry the Grand.
A lean tug shudders in the Seine;
And Notre Dame is black, a relic
Of the blood of other men.

Peace to the other men! And peace
To the mind that has no century,
And sees the savage pull the statue down,
And down the bear and clown.

The spiritual control in a poem, then, is simply a manifestation
of the spiritual control within the poet, and, as I have already
indicated, it may have been an important means by which the
poet arrived at a realization of spiritual control. This conception
must not be confused with the conception of the poem as a safety
valve, by which feeling is diverted from action, by which the
writer escapes from an attitude by pouring it into his work and
leaving it behind him. The conception which I am trying to de-
fine is a conception of poetry as a technique of contemplation, of
comprehension, a technique which does not eliminate the need

21

of philosophy or of religion, but which, rather, completes and
enriches them.

One feels, whether rightly or wrongly, a correlation between
the control evinced within a poem and the control within the poet
behind it. The laxity of the one ordinarily appears to involve lax-
ity in the other. The rather limp versification of Mr. Eliot and of
Mr. MacLeish is inseparable from the spiritual limpness that one
feels behind the poems, as the fragmentary, ejaculatory, and over-
excited quality of a great many of the poems of Hart Crane is
inseparable from the intellectual confusion upon which these
particular poems seem to rest (for examples, The Dance, Cape
Hatteras, and Atlantis^). Crane possessed great energy, but his
faculties functioned clearly only within a limited range of experi-
ence (Repose of Rivers, Voyages II, Faustus and Helen II). Out-
side of that range he was either numb (My Grandmother's Love-
letters and Harbor Dawn) or unsure of himself and hence un-
certain in his detail (as in The River, a very powerful poem in
spite of its poor construction and its quantities of bad writing) or
both (see Indiana, probably one of the worst poems in modern
literature). Many of the poems of Mr. Eliot and of Mr. Mac-
Leish could be reduced by paraphrase to about the same thing as
my paraphrase of Mr. Tate's sonnet; the difference between
them and Mr. Tate in this connection is that, as the form of
nearly all of their poems is much looser to start with, the process
of paraphrasing would constitute a much slighter act of betrayal.
And we must not forget that this quality, form, is not something
outside the poet, something "aesthetic/' and superimposed upon
his moral content; it is essentially a part, in fact it may be the
decisive part, of the moral content, even though the poet may be
arriving at the final perfection of the condition he is communicat-
ing while he communicates it and in a large measure as a result
of the act and technique of communication. For the communica-
tion is first of all with himself: it is, as I have said, the last re-
finement of contemplation.

I should pause here to remark that many writers have sought
to seize the fluidity of experience by breaking down the limits
of form, but that in so doing, they defeat their own ends. For,

22

as I have shown, writing, as it approaches the looseness of prose
and departs from the strictness of verse, tends to lose the capacity
for fluid or highly complex relationships between words; lan-
guage, in short, reapproaches its original stiffness and generality;
and one is forced to recognize the truth of what appears a para-
dox, that the greatest fluidity of statement is possible where the
greatest clarity of form prevails. It is hard to see how the exist-
ence of such a work as Mr. Joyce's latest creation2 can be any-
thing but precarious, in spite of its multitudes of incidental felici-
ties; for it departs from the primary condition of prose— coherent
and cumulative logic or narrative— without, since it is, finally,
prose, achieving the formal precision of verse. These remarks
should not be construed, however, as an argument against free
verse, though, with proper qualification, they could be brought
to bear in such an argument. The free verse that is really verse—
the best, that is, of W. C. Williams, H. D., Miss Moore, Wallace
Stevens, and Ezra Pound— is, in its peculiar fashion, the antith-
esis of free, and the evaluation of this verse is a difficult prob-
lem in itself.

Thus we see that the poet, in striving toward an ideal of poetic
form at which he has arrived through the study of other poets, is
actually striving to perfect a moral attitude toward that range of
experience of which he is aware. Such moral attitudes are con-
tagious from poet to poet, and, within the life of a single poet,
from poem to poem. The presence of Hardy and Arnold, let us
say, in so far as their successful works offer us models and their
failures warnings or unfulfilled suggestions, should make it easier
to write good poetry; they should not only aid us, by providing
standards of sound feeling, to test the soundness of our own
poems, but, since their range of experience is very wide, they
should aid us, as we are able to enter and share their experience,
to grow into regions that we had not previously mastered or per-
haps even discovered. The discipline of imitation is thus valuable
if it leads to understanding and assimilation. Too often a minor
poet or other reader will recognize in such a master the validity
of only that part of the master's experience which corresponds to

'Entitled at this writing (1935) Work in Progress. (Ultimately published
as Finnegans Wake.) 22

his own limited range, and will rule out the poetry to which he
is consequently numb as sentimental or otherwise imperfect. In-
flexibility of critical opinion in such matters is not particularly
conducive to growth.

Random experiment may have a related value: one may hit
on a form (perhaps the rough idea or draft of a form) which in-
duces some new state or states of mind. I regard as fallacious the
notion that form is determined by a precedent attitude or a prec-
edent subject matter, at least invariably: the form (that is, the
general idea of a certain type of form) may precede, and the
attitude, in any case, is never definite till the form is achieved.3
It does not follow that any attitude resulting from random experi-
ment is intrinsically desirable; undesirable attitudes, like desir-
able, are contagious and may spread widely; it is here that
criticism becomes necessary. A failure, however, to achieve some-
thing valuable may offer a valuable suggestion to someone else.
The poet who has succeeded once or twice in mastering difficult
and central emotions and in recording his mastery for future
reference should find it easier to succeed again.

I am not endeavoring in the two foregoing paragraphs to estab-
lish poetry as a substitute for philosophy or for religion. Religion
is highly desirable if it is really available to the individual; the
study of philosophy is always available and is of incalculable
value as a preliminary and as a check to activities as a poet and as
a critic (that is, as an intelligent reader). I am, then, merely
attempting to define a few of the things which poetry does.

It would perhaps be wise to add another caution : I suffer from
no illusion that any man who can write a good poem has a nat-
urally sweet moral temper or that the man who has written three
good poems is a candidate for canonization. Literary history is
packed with sickening biographies. But it is worth noting that
the poetry of such a man, say, as Rochester (who in this is typical
of his age) displays a mastery of an extremely narrow range of

8 As a single example, consider the manner in which the Petrarchan experi-
menters in England, most of them feeble poets and the best of them given to
empty and inflated reasoning, worked out the technique of reasoning elaoorately
in graceful lyrical verse and bequeathed that technique to the 17th century:
the form preceded the matter.

24

experience, and that his moral brutality falls almost wholly in
those regions (nearly every region save that of worldly manners,
if we except some few poems, notably Upon Nothing, Absent
from Thee, and, possibly, A Song of a Young Lady to Her
Ancient Lover, in which last there is a curious blending of the
erotic with deep moral feeling) with which his poetry fails to
deal or with which it deals badly.

This statement requires elucidation. Rochester frequently
writes of his debauchery, and sometimes writes well of it, but in
the best poems on the subject, in such poems as The Maimd
Debauchee and Upon Drinking in a Bowl, he writes, as do his
contemporaries in the comedy, as a witty and satirical gentleman :
the wit inspired by the material is mastered, and other aspects of
the material are ignored. In the worst poems on more or less
similar material (for examples, the numerous lampoons upon
Charles II and upon Nell Gwyn) we have a grossness of feeling
comparable to that of his worst actions. All of this, however, de-
tracts not in the least from the quality of Rochester's best poetry,
which is remarkably fine; Rochester seldom extends the stand-
ards which he recognizes into fields to which they are inap-
plicable, and hence he is seldom guilty of false evaluation. In
reading him, one is aware that he is a sound and beautiful poet,
and that there are greater poets. That is all of which one has a
right to be aware.4

If a poem, in so far as it is good, ^presents the comprehension
on a moral plane of a given experience, it is only fair to add that
some experiences offer very slight difficulties and some very great,
and that the poem will be the most valuable, which, granted it
achieves formal perfection, represents the most difficult victory.
In the great tragic poets, such as Racine or Shakespeare, one feels
that a victory has been won over life itself, so much is implicated
in the subject matter; that feeling is the source of their power
over us, whereas a slighter poet will absorb very little of our ex-
perience and leave the rest untouched.

This requisite seems to be ignored in a large measure by a good

* The Collected Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, edited by John
Hayward. The Nonesuch Press, 16 Great James St., London, W.C. 1926.

25

many contemporary poets of more or less mystical tendencies,
who avoid the difficult task of mastering the more complex forms
of experience by setting up a theoretic escape from them and by
then accepting that escape with a good deal of lyrical enthusiasm.
Such an escape is offered us, I fear, by Hart Crane, in one of the
most extraordinary sections of his volume, The Bridge,6 in the
poem called The Dance, and such escapes are often employed by
Mr. Yeats. In the religious poets of the past, one encounters this
vice very seldom; the older religions are fully aware that the
heart, to borrow the terms of a poem by Janet Lewis, is untranslat-
able, whatever may be true of the soul, and that one can escape
from the claims of the world only by understanding those claims
and by thus accustoming oneself to the thought of eventually
putting them by. This necessity is explicitly the subject of one of
Sidney's greatest sonnets, Leave me, O Love, which readiest hut
to dust, and of the greatest poem by George Herbert, Church
Monuments; one can find it elsewhere. The attitude is humane,
and does not belittle nor evade the magnitude of the task; it is
essentially a tragic attitude.

For this reason, the religious fervor of Gerard Hopkins, of
John Donne, or of George Herbert should weaken but little the
force of most of their poems for the non-believer, just as the
deterministic doctrines, whatever their nature and extent, to be
found in Hardy, should not weaken for us those poems which do
not deal too pugnaciously with the doctrines, and for the same
reason. Though a belief in any form of determinism should, if
the belief is pushed to its logical ends, eliminate the belief in,
and consequently the functioning of, whatever it is that we call
the will, yet there is no trace of any kind of disintegration in
Hardy's poetic style, in his sense of form, which we have seen to
be, so far as writing is concerned, identical with the will or the
ability to control and shape one's experience. The tragic neces-
sity of putting by the claims of the world without the abandon-
ment of self-control, without loss of the ability to go on living,
for the present, intelligently and well, is just as definitely the
subject of Hardy's poetry as of Herbert's. We have in both poets

6 The Bridge, by Hart Crane, Horace Liveright: N. Y.: 1930.
26

a common moral territory which is far greater than are the theo-
logical regions which they do not share; for, on the one hand,
the fundamental concepts of morality are common to intelligent
men regardless of theological orientation, except in so far as
morality may be simply denied or ignored, and, on the other
hand, the Absolute is in its nature inscrutable and offers little
material for speculation, except in so far as it is a stimulus to
moral speculation. It would be difficult, I think, to find a devo-
tional poem of which most of the implications were not moral
and universal. So with Hardy: his determinism was mythic and
animistic and tended to dramatize the human struggle, whereas
a genuinely rational and coherent determinism would have
eliminated the human struggle. He was thrown back upon tradi-
tional literary and folk wisdom in working out moral situations,
and for these situations his mythology provided a new setting,
sometimes magnificent, sometimes melodramatic, but, thanks to
its rational incompleteness, not really destructive of a working
morality. Like many another man who has been unable to think
clearly, he was saved by the inability to think coherently: had he
been coherent, he would probably have been about as interesting
as Godwin; as it is, his professed beliefs and his working beliefs
have only a little in common, and the former damage his work
only in a fragmentary way, as when satires of circumstance are
dragged into a novel or isolated in a poem to prove a point (and
they can prove nothing, of course) and usually to the detriment
of coherent feeling and understanding.

Crane's attitude, on the other hand, often suggests a kind of
theoretic rejection of all human endeavor in favor of some
vaguely apprehended but ecstatically asserted existence of a
superior sort. As the exact nature of the superior experience is
uncertain, it forms a rather uncertain and infertile source of
material for exact poetry; one can write poetry about it only by
utilizing in some way more or less metaphorical the realm of ex-
perience from which one is trying to escape; but as one is en-
deavoring to escape from this realm, not to master it and under-
stand it, one's feelings about it are certain to be confused, and
one's imagery drawn from it is bound to be largely formulary and

devoid of meaning. That is, in so far as one endeavors to deal
with the Absolute, not as a means of ordering one's moral per-
ception but as the subject itself of perception, one will tend to
say nothing, despite the multiplication of words. In The Dance
there seems to be an effort to apply to each of two mutually ex-
lusive fields the terms of the other. This is a vice of which
i \ochester was not guilty.

Crane's best work, such as Repose of Rivers and Voyages II,
is not confused, but one feels that the experience is curiously
limited and uncomplicated: it is between the author, isolated
from most human complications, and Eternity. Crane becomes in
such poems a universal symbol of the human mind in a par-
ticular situation, a fact which is the source of his power, but of
the human mind in very nearly the simplest form of that situ-
ation, a fact which is the source of his limitation.

Objective proof of this assertion cannot be found in the poems,
any more than proof of the opposite quality can be found in
Hardy; it is in each poet a matter of feeling invading the poetry
mainly by'Vvay of the non-paraphrasable content: one feels the
fragility of Crane's finest work, just as one feels the richness of
Hardy's. Hardy is able to utilize, for example, great ranges of
literary, historical, and other connotations in words and cadences;
one feels behind each word the history of the word and the gen-
erations of men who embodied that history; Hardy gets somehow
at the wealth of the race. It should be observed again how the
moral discipline is involved in the literary discipline, how it be-
comes, at times, almost a matter of living philology. From the
greater part of this wealth Crane appears to be isolated and con-
tent to remain isolated. His isolation, like Hardy's immersion,
was in part social and unavoidable, but a clearer mind and a more
fixed intention might have overcome much of the handicap.

I should like to forestall one possible objection to the theory
of poetry which I am trying to elucidate. Poetry, as a moral dis-
cipline, should not be regarded as one more means of escape.
That is, moral responsibility should not be transferred from
action to paper in the face of a particular situation. Poetry, if pur-
sued either by the poet or by the reader, in the manner which
28

I have suggested, should offer a means of enriching one's aware-
ness of human experience and of so rendering greater the pos-
sibility of intelligence in the course of future action; and it
should offer likewise a means of inducing certain more or less
constant habits of feeling, which should render greater the pos-
sibility of one's acting, in a future situation, in accordance wit!
the findings of one's improved intelligence. It should, in othe*
words, increase the intelligence and strengthen the moral temper;
these effects should naturally be carried over into action, if,
through constant discipline, they are made permanent acqui-
sitions. If the poetic discipline is to have steadiness and direction,
it requires an antecedent discipline of ethical thinking and of at
least some ethical feeling, which may be in whole or in part the
gift of religion or of a social tradition, or which may be largely the
result of individual acquisition by way of study. The poetic dis-
cipline includes the antecedent discipline and more: it is the
richest and most perfect technique of contemplation.

This view of poetry in its general outline is not original, but is
a restatement of ideas that have been current in English criticism
since the time of Sidney, that have appeared again in most of
the famous apologists for poetry since Sidney, especially in
Arnold and in Newman. In summarizing these ideas, I have
merely endeavored to illuminate a few of the more obscure re-
lationships and to dispose of them in such a way as to prepare
the reader for various analyses of poetic method which I intend,
in other essays, to undertake. Poetic morality and poetic feeling
are inseparable; feeling and technique, or structure, are insepa-
rable. Technique has laws which govern poetic (and perhaps
more general) morality more widely than is commonly recog-
nized. It is my intention to examine them.

29

THE EXPERIMENTAL SCHOOL
IN AMERICAN POETRY

An Analytical Survey of Its Structural Methods,
Exclusive of Meter

DURING THE SECOND and third decades of the twentieth century,
the chief poetic talent of the United States took certain new
directions, directions that appear to me in the main regrettable.
The writers between Robinson and Frost, on the one hand, and
Allen Tate and Howard Baker on the other, who remained rela-
tively traditional in manner were with few exceptions minor or
negligible;^the more interesting writers, as I shall endeavor to
show in these pages, were misguided, and in discussing them I
shall have little to say of their talents, their ineliminable virtues,
but shall rather take these for granted.

In order that I may evaluate the new structural methods, I
shall have first to describe at least briefly the old. Inasmuch as
a wider range of construction is possible in the short poem than
in any of the longer literary forms, I shall deal with principles
that are fundamental to all literary composition, and shall here
and there have recourse to illustrations drawn from the novel or
perhaps from the drama. The virtues of the traditional modes
of construction will be indicated chiefly in connection with my
discussion of the defects of the recent experimental modes.

Type I: THE METHOD OF REPETITION

KENNETH BURKE HAS NAMED and described this method without
evaluating it.1 It is the simplest and most primitive method pos-

1 In Counterstatement (Harcourt, Brace and Co.: 1932).
30

sible, and is still in common use; if limited to a short lyrical form,
it may still be highly effective. It consists in a restatement in suc-
cessive stanzas of a single theme, the terms, or images, being
altered in each restatement. Two of the finest poems in the form
are Nashe's poem on the plague (Adieu! Farewell earth's Hiss)
and Raleigh's poem entitled The Lie. In such a poem there is no
rational necessity for any order of sequence, the order being deter-
mined wholly by the author's feeling about the graduation of
importance or intensity. Nevertheless, such a poem rests on a
formulable logic, however simple; that is, the theme can be para-
phrased in general terms. Such a paraphrase, of course, is not the
equivalent of a poem: a poem is more than its paraphrasable con-
tent. But, as we shall eventually see, many poems cannot be para-
phrased and are therefore defective.

The method of repetition is essentially the same today as it
has always been, if we confine our attention to the short poem.
Of recent years, however, there has been a tendency to extend
it into longer forms, with unfortunate results. Such extension is
the chief method of Whitman, and results in a form both lax
and diffuse. Such extension occurs even in many modern attempts
at narrative, both in prose and in verse. To illustrate what I say,
I shall venture to summarize the structural defects of the narra-
tive poetry of Robinson Jeffers:

Mr. Jeffers is theologically some kind of monist. He envisages,
as did Wordsworth, nature as Deity; but his Nature is the Nature
of the text-book in physics and not that of the rambling botanist
—Mr. Jeffers seems to have taken the terminology of modern
physics more literally than it is meant by its creators. Nature, or
God, is thus a kind of self-sufficient mechanism, of which man is
a product, but from which man is cut off by his humanity (just
what gave rise to this humanity, which is absolutely severed from
all communication with God, is left for others to decide) : as there
is no mode of communication with God or from God, God is
praised adequately only by the screaming demons that make up
the atom. Man, if he accepts this dilemma as necessary, can
choose between two modes of action : he may renounce God and

31

rely upon his humanity, or he may renounce his humanity and
rely upon God.

In the narratives preceding Cawdor2 and in most of the lyrics,
Mr. Jeffers preaches the second choice. In Cawdor and in Thur-
so's Landing* he has attempted a compromise: that is, while
the tragic characters recognize that the second choice would be
the more reasonable, they make the first in a kind of half-hearted
stubbornness. They insist on living, but without knowing why,
and without any good to which to look forward save the final
extinction in God, when it comes ,in God's time. Their stubborn-
ness is meaningless.

Life as such is incest, an insidious and destructive evil. So
much, says Mr. Jeffers by implication, for Greek and Christian
ethics. Now the mysticism of such a man as San Juan de la Cruz
offers at least the semblance of a spiritual, a human, discipline as
a preliminary to union with Divinity; but for Mr. Jeffers a simple
and mechanical device lies always ready; namely, suicide, a de-
vice to which he has, I believe, never resorted.

In refusing to take this step, however, Mr. Jeffers illustrates
one of a very interesting series of romantic compromises. The
romantic of the ecstatically pantheistic type denies life yet goes
on living;4 nearly all romantics decry the intellect and philosophy,
yet they offer justifications, necessarily incoherent but none the
less rational in intention, of their attitude, they are prone to be-
little literary technique, yet they write, and too often with small
efficiency; they preach, in the main, the doctrine of moral
equivalence, yet their every action, whether private or literary,
since it rests on a choice, is a denial of the doctrine. Not all
romantics are guilty of all these forms of confusion, but the
romantic who is guilty of all is more consistent thah is he who
is guilty only of some, for all inhere in each from a rational
standpoint. And Mr. Jeffers, having decried human life, and
having denied the worth of the rules of the game, endeavors to

* Cawdor and Other Poems, by Robinson Jeffers. Horace Liveright, New
York, 1928.

'TJwrso's Landing, same. Liveright Inc., New York, 1932.

4 Hart Crane, unlike Mr. Jeffers, demonstrated the seriousness of his convic-
tion, but the demonstration did nothing to clarify his concepts.

write narrative and dramatic poems, poems, in other words, deal-
ing with people who are playing the game. Jesus, the hero of Dear
Judas,6 speaking apparently for Mr. Jeffers, says that the secret
reason for the doctrine of forgiveness is that all men are driven
to act as they do, by the mechanism-God, that they are entirely
helpless; yet he adds in the next breath that this secret must br*
guarded, for if it were given out, men would run amuck— the^
would begin acting differently.6

The Women at Point Sur7 is a perfect laboratory of Mr. Jeffers'
philosophy and a perfect example of his narrative method. Bar-
clay, an insane divine, preaches Mr. Jeffers' religion, and his dis-
ciples, acting upon it, become emotional mechanisms, lewd and
twitching conglomerations of plexuses, their humanity annulled.
Human experience in these circumstances, having necessarily
and according to the doctrine, no meaning, there can be no neces-
sary sequence of events: every act is equivalent to every other;
every act is devoid of consequence and occurs in a perfect vac-
uum; most of the incidents could be shuffled about into different
sequences without violating anything save Mr. Jeffers' sense of
their relative intensity.

Since the poem is his, of course, this sense may appear a legiti-
mate criterion; the point is, that this is not a narrative nor a
dramatic but is a lyrical criterion. A successful lyrical poem of
one hundred and seventy-five pages is unlikely, for the essence of
lyrical expression is concentration; but it is at least hypotheti-
cally possible. The difficulty here is that the lyric achieves its
effect by the generalization of experience (that is, the motiva-
tion of the lyric is stated or implied in a summary form, and is
ordinarily not given in detailed narrative) and by the concentra-
tion of expression; lyrical poetry tends to be expository. Narra-
tive can survive fairly well without distinction of style, provided
the narrative logic is complete and compelling, as in the work*

•Dear Judas (Horace Liveright: 1929).

* This dilemma is not new in American literature. In the eighteenth century,
Jonathan Edwards accomplished a revival in the Puritan Church, that is, in-
duced large numbers of sinners to repent and enter the church, by preaching
the doctrine of election and the inability to repent.

''The Women at Point Sur (Boni and Liveright: 1927).

33

of Balzac, though this occurs most often in prose. Now Mr.
Jeffers, as I have pointed out, has abandoned narrative logic with
the theory of ethics, and he has never, in addition, achieved a
distinguished style: his writing, line by line, is pretentious trash.
There are a few good phrases, but they are very few, and none is
first-rate.

Mr. Jeffers has no method of sustaining his lyric, then, other
than the employment of an accidental (that is, a non-narrative
and repetitious) series of anecdotes (that is, of details that are
lyrically impure, details clogged with too much information to
be able to function properly as lyrical details); his philosophical
doctrine and his artistic dilemma alike decree that these shall be
at an hysterical pitch of feeling. By this method, Mr. Jeffers con-
tinually lays claim to extreme feeling, which has no support
whether of structure or of detail and which is therefore simply un-
mastered and self-inflicted hysteria.

Cawdor contains a plot which in its rough outlines might be
sound, and Cawdor likewise contains his best poetry: the lines
describing the seals at dawn, especially, are very good. But the
plot is blurred for lack of style and for lack of moral intelligence
on the part of the author. As in Thurso's Landing, of which the
writing is much worse, the protagonists desire to live as the result
of a perfectly unreasoning and meaningless stubbornness, and
their actions are correspondingly obscure. Mr. Jeffers will not
even admit the comprehensible motive of cowardice. In The
Tower beyond Tragedy,8 Mr. Jeffers takes one of the very best
of ready-made plots, the Orestes-Clytemnestra situation, the
peculiar strength of which lies in the fact that Orestes is forced
to choose between two crimes, the murder of his mother and the
failure to avenge his father. But at the very last moment, in Mr.
Jeffers' version, Orestes is converted to Mr. Jeffers' religion and
goes off explaining to Electra (who has just tried to seduce him)
that though men may think he is fleeing from the furies, he is
really doing no more than drift up to the mountains to medi-
tate on the stars. And the preceding action is, of course, rendered
meaningless.

* In the volume called The Women at Point Sur, previously mentioned.

34

Dear Judas is a kind of dilution of The Women at Point Stir,
with Jesus as Barclay, and with a less detailed background. The
Loving Shepherdess9 deals with a girl who knows herself doomed
to die at a certain time in child-birth, and who wanders over the
countryside caring for a small and diminishing flock of sheep in
an anguish of devotion. The events here also are anecdotal and
reversible, and the feeling is lyrical or nothing. The heroine is
turned cruelly from door to door, and the sheep fall one by one
before the reader's eyes, the sheep and the doors constituting the
matter of the narrative; until finally the girl dies in a ditch in an
impossible effort to give birth to hei child.

Type II: THE LOGICAL METHOD

BY THE LOGICAL METHOD of composition, I mean simply explicitly
rational progression from one detail to another: the poem has a
clearly evident expository structure. Marvell's poem To His Coy
Mistress, as Mr. T. S. Eliot has said, has something of the struc-
ture of a syllogism, if the relationships only of the three para-
graphs to each other be considered:10 within each paragraph the
structure is repetitive. The logical method is a late and sophisti-
cated procedure that in Europe is most widespread in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, though it appears earlier and
continues later. It was exploited, mastered, and frequently de-
bauched by the English Metaphysical School, for example,
though it was not invariably employed by them.

Sometimes in the Metaphysical poets, frequently in the drama-
tists contemporary with them, and far too often in the poetry of
the twentieth century, the logical structure becomes a shell empty
of logic but exploiting certain elusive types of feeling. The forms
of pseudo-logic I shall reserve for treatment under another head-
ing.

By stretching our category a trifle we may include under this
heading poems implicitly rational, provided the implications of
rationality are at all points clear. William Carlos Williams' poem,

* In the volume entitled Dear Judas.

10 Selected Essays, by T. S. Eliot. Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York: 1932.

35

On the Road to the Contagious Hospital, may serve as an ex-
ample.11 On the other hand, Rimbaud's Larme, a poem which,
like that of Dr. Williams, describes a landscape, is unf ormulable :
it is an example of what Kenneth Burke has called qualitative
progression, a type of procedure that I shall consider later. The
poem by Williams, though its subject is simple, is a poem of
directed meditation; the poem by Rimbaud is one of non-rational
and hallucinatory terror.

Type III: NARRATIVE

NARRATIVE ACHIEVES coherence largely through a feeling that
the events of a sequence are necessary parts of a causative chain,
or plausible interferences with a natural causative chain. In this
it is similar to logic. The hero, being what he is and in a given
situation, seems to act naturally or unnaturally; if his action
seems natural, and is in addition reasonably interesting and, from
an ethical point of view, important, the narrative is in the main
successful.*. To this extent, Mr. Kenneth Burke is wrong, I be-
lieve, in censuring nineteenth century fiction for its concern with
what he calls the psychology of the hero as opposed to the con-
cern with the psychology of the audience:12 by the former, he
means the plausibility of the portrait; by the latter the concern
with those rhetorical devices which please and surprise the reader,
devices, for example, of the type of which Fielding was a con-
summate master. Mr. Burke overlooks the facts that rhetoric can-
not exist without a subject matter, and that the subject matter of
fiction is narration, that, in short, the author's most important in-
strument for controlling the attitude of the audience is precisely
the psychology of the hero. Mr. Burke is right, however, in that
there are other, less important but necessary means of controll-
ing the attitude of the audience, and that most of the standard fic-
tion of the nineteenth century, sometimes for neglecting them,
sometimes for utilizing them badly, suffers considerably.

Mr. Burke, in his own compositions, with a precocious security

11 Spring and All, bv William Carlos Williams. Contact Editions, Paris, The
poem is quoted in full in the essay on Poetic Convention, in this book.
u In the volume called Counterstatement, already mentioned.

36

that is discouraging, reverses the Victorian formula: in his novel,
Towards a Better Life,13 he concentrates on the sentence, or
occasionally on the paragraph, that is, on the incidental. He has
attained what appears to be his chief end: he has made himself
guotable. His book contains some good aphorisms and many bad;
it contains some excellent interludes, such as the fable of the
scholar with the face like a vegetable, or the paragraph on Vol-
taire. Any of these felicities may be removed from their context
with perfect impunity, for there really is no context: Towards a
Better Life, as a whole, is duller than Thackeray. On the other
hand, such writers as Jane Austen and Edith Wharton are likely
to be wittier than Mr. Burke; but their wit, like that of Moli&re,
is not often separable from their context, since it is primarily a
context that they are creating.

Short sketches in prose often deal with the revelation of a
situation instead of with the development of one. The result is
static, but if the prose is skillful and does not run to excessive
length, it may be successful: Cunninghame Graham's At Dal-
mary14 is a fine example. Other things being equal, however
(which, of course, they never are), action should lend power. In
a short narrative poem it matters little whether the situation be
revealed or developed: the force of the poetic language can raise
the statement to great impressiveness either way; in fact, the
process of revelation itself may take on in a short poem a quality
profoundly dramatic.15 The famous English Ballad, Edward, Mr.
E. A. Robinson's Luke Havergal,™ Her Going17 by Agnes Lee,
are all examples of revelation at a high level of excellence. Mr.
Robinson's Eros Turannos™ is a fine example of development
within a short form.

M Towards a Better Life, by Kenneth Burke. Harcourt, Brace and Co. : New
York: 1932.

14 Hope, by Cunninghame Graham. Duckeworth, London.

15 It is curious that this procedure if employed in a long form, such as the
novel or the play, tends to degenerate into bald melodrama; it is the essential,
for example, of detective fiction. On the other hand, it is in a large part the
form of The Ambassadors, the revelation in this, however, motivating further
development.

ie Collected Poems, by E. A. Robinson: Macmillan.

17 Faces and Open Doors, by Agnes Lee. R. F. Seymour, Chicago, 1932.

37

The coherence of character may be demonstrated, as in the
novels of Henry James, in a closed, or dramatic plot, in which
personage acts upon personage, and in which accident and me-
chanical change play little part; or the personage may prove him-
self coherent in a struggle with pure accident, as in Defoe, who
pits Moll Flanders against the wilderness of London, or as in
Melville, who pits Ahab against the complex wilderness of the
sea, of brute nature, and of moral evil; or there may be, as in
Mrs. Wharton, a merging of the two extremes: in Mrs. Wharton,
the impersonal adversary is usually represented by a human being
such as Undine Spragg or the elder Raycie, who is morally or
intellectually undeveloped, so that the protagonist is unable to
cope with him in human terms. The novel is not the drama, and
to demand of it dramatic plot appears to me unreasonable. The
form permits the treatment of a great deal of material impossible
in the drama, and the material, since it is important in human
life, ought to be treated. It is certain, however, that narrative re-
quires coherence of character, and coherence necessitates change.
Fielding is dull in bulk because his characters do not develop and
because his incidents are without meaning except as anecdotal
excuses for the exercise of style. Defoe's rhetoric is less agile, but
his conception is more solid.

In addition to having greater range, the novel of accident may
have advantages over the dramatic novel which are perhaps too
seldom considered. The author is less likely to be restricted to
the exact contents of the minds of his characters, and so he may
have greater opportunity to exhibit, directly or indirectly, his own
attitudes, which, in most cases, may be more complex than the
attitudes of his characters. Fielding, for example, would have been
seriously embarrassed to treat Tom Jones from the point of view
of Tom Jones. Melville accomplishes even more with his per-
sonal freedom than does Fielding. The superstition that the au-
thor should write wholly from within the minds of his characters
appears to have grown up largely as a reaction to the degenera-
tion of Fieldingese among the Victorians, notably Thackeray and
Dickens, and perhaps Meredith, and perhaps in part as a result
of the achievements in the newer mode by Flaubert and by Henry

38

James. Flaubert is misleading, however, in that the perfection and
subtlety of his style introduces an important element from with-
out the consciousness of the character in a manner that may be
overlooked; and James is misleading not only in this respect but
because his characters are usually almost as highly developed as
the author himself, so that the two are frequently all but indis-
tinguishable. The superstition is reduced to absurdity in some of
Mr. Hemingway's short stories about prize-fighters and bull-
fighters, whose views of their own experience are about as valu-
able as the views of the Sunbonnet Babies or of Little Black
Sambo.

Theoretically, that fictional convention should be most desir-
able which should allow the author to deal with a character from
a position formally outside the mind of the character, and which
should allow him to analyze, summarize, and arrange material,
as author, and without regard to the way in which the character
might be supposed to have perceived the material originally.
This procedure should permit the greatest possibility of rhetori-
cal range; should permit the direct play of the intelligence of
the author, over and above the intelligence and limitations of the
character; it should permit the greatest possible attention to what
Mr. Kenneth Burke has called the psychology of the audience in
so far as it is separable from what he calls the psychology of the
hero: Mr. Burke, in fact, in his own novel, Towards a Better Life,
employs a modified stream-of-consciousness convention, thus
limiting the rhetorical range very narrowly, and confining him-
self to a very narrow aspect of the psychology of the hero, so far
as the construction of his work as a whole is concerned, and in a
large measure as regards all relationships beyond those within the
individual sentence. The convention which I should recommend
is that of the first-rate biography or history (Johnson's Lives, for
example, or Hume, or Macaulay) instead of the various post-
Joycean conventions now prevalent. Exposition may be made an
art; so may historical summary; in fact, the greatest prose in exist-
ence is that of the greatest expository writers. The novel should
not forego these sources of strength. If it be argued that the first
aim of the novelist is to reach a public from whom the great ex-

39

positors are isolated by their very virtues, then the novelist is in
exactly that measure unworthy of serious discussion. My recom-
mendation is not made wholly in the absence of examples, how-
ever: allowances made for individual limitations of scope and de-
fects of procedure, Jane Austen, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry
James, Fielding, and Defoe may be called to serve; Edith Whar-
ton at her best, in such performances as Bunner Sisters and False
Dawn, as The Valley of Decision and The Age of Innocence, is
nearly the perfect example.

Type IV: PSEUDO-REFERENCE

EVERY LINE or passage of good poetry, every good poetic phrase,
communicates a certain quality of feeling as well as a certain
paraphrasable content. It would be possible to write a poem un-
impeachable as to rational sequence, yet wholly inconsecutive
in feeling or even devoid of feeling. Meredith and Browning
often display both defects. Chapman's Hero and Leander is a
rational continuation of Marlowe's beginning, but the break in
feeling is notorious.

Suppose that we imagine the reversal of this formula, retain-
ing in our language coherence of feeling, but as far as possible
reducing rational coherence. The reduction may be accomplished
in either of two ways: (1) we may retain the syntactic forms and
much of the vocabulary of rational coherence, thus aiming to ex-
ploit the feeling of rational coherence in its absence or at least
in excess of its presence; or (2) we may abandon all pretence of
rational coherence. The first of these methods I have called
pseudo-reference and shall treat in this section. The second I
shall reserve for the next section.

Pseudo-reference takes a good many forms. I shall list as many
forms as I have observed. My list will probably not be complete,
but it will be nearly enough complete to illustrate the principle
and to provide a basis of further observation.

1. Grammatical coherence in excess of, or in the absence of,
rational coherence. This may mean no more than a slight excess
40

of grammatical machinery, a minor redundancy. Thus Miss
Moore, in Black Earth:

I do these

things which I do, which please
no one lout myself.1*

The words which I have set in Roman are redundant. Again, in
Reinforcements™ Miss Moore writes:

the future of time is determined by
the power of volition

when she means:

volition determines the future.

Miss Moore is usually ironic when writing thus, but not always;
and I confess that it appears to me a somewhat facile and diffuse
kind of irony, for the instrument of irony (the poetry) is weak-
ened in the interests of irony. It is an example of what I shall
have repeated occasion to refer to as the fallacy of expressive, or
imitative, form; the procedure in which the form succumbs to
the raw material of the poem. It is as if Dryden had descended to
imitating Shadwell's style in his efforts to turn it to ridicule.

Closely related to this procedure, but much more audacious, is
the maintenance of grammatical coherence when there is no co-
herence of thought or very little. Hart Crane, for example, has
placed at the beginning of his poem, For the Marriage of Faustus
and Helen,19 the following quotation from Ben Jonson's play,
The Alchemist:

And so we may arrive by Talmud skill
And profane Greek to raise the building up

18 Observations, by Marianne Moore. The Dial Press: N. Y. 1924.
™ White Buildings, by Hart Crane. Boni and Liveright: 1926.

41

Of Helens house against the Ismaelite,
King of Thogarma, and his habergeons
Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the farce
Of King Abaddon, and the beast of Cittim;
Which Rabbi David Kimchi; Onkelos,
And Aben Ezra do interpret Rome.20

This is one of the numerous passages in* the play, in which
the characters speak nonsense purporting to contain deep alchem-
ical secrets or to express a feignedly distraught state of mind: this
particular passage serves both functions at once. The nonsense
is necessary to Jonson's plot; the reader recognizes the necessity
and can make no objection, so that he is forced to accept with un-
alloyed pleasure whatever elusive but apparently real poetic im-
plications there may be in such a passage, since he receives these
implications absolutely gratis. The technique of expressive form,
to which I have alluded, is here forced upon Jonson in a measure
by the dramatic medium, for the characters must be represented
in their oWft persons; this may or may not indicate a defect in the
medium itself, as compared to other methods of satire, but at any
rate there is no misuse of the medium. Jonson appears, then, to
have been wholly aware of this procedure, which is usually re-
garded as a Mallarmean or Rimbaldian innovation, and Crane
appears to have found at least one of his chief models for this
kind of writing in Jonson. Jonson differs from Crane in that he
does not employ the method when writing in his own name, but
merely employs it to characterize his cozeners.

The two sections in blank verse of Faustus and Helen resemble
Jonson's nonsense very closely. For example:

The mind is brushed by sparrow wings;
Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd
The margins of the day, accent the curbs,
Conveying divers dawns on every corner
To druggist, barber, and tobacconist,
Until the graduate opacities of evening
90 Act IV: 3. Regarding this discussion, see Foreword on p. 153.
42

Take them away as suddenly to somewhere
Virginal, perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.

This is perfectly grammatical, and if not examined too carefully
may appear more or less comprehensible. But the activities of
the numbers, if the entire sentence is surveyed, appear wholly
obscure. If one suppose numbers to be a synonym for numbers of
persons, for crowds, one or two points are cleared up, but no
more. If one suppose the numbers to be the mathematical abstrac-
tions of modern life, structural, temporal, financial, and others
similar, there is greater clarity; but the first five lines are so pre-
cious and indirect as to be somewhat obscure, and the last three
lines are perfectly obscure.

There is a pleasanter example of the same kind of writing in
a shorter poem by Crane, and from the same volume, the poem
called Sunday Morning Apples:

A boy runs with a dog before the sun, straddling
Spontaneities that form their independent orbits,
Their own perennials of light
In the valley where you live

(called Brandy wine. )

The second line, taken in conjunction with the first, conveys the
action of the boy, but it does so indirectly and by suggestion.
What it says, if we consider rational content alone, is really inde-
cipherable. One can, of course, make a rational paraphrase, but
one can do it, not by seeking the rational content of the lines,
but by seeking suggestions as to the boy's behavior, and by then
making a rational statement regarding it. The line has a certain
loveliness and conveys what it sets out to convey: the objection
which I should make to it is that it goes through certain motions
that are only half effective. A greater poet would have made the
rational formula count rationally, at the same time that he was
utilizing suggestion; he would thus have achieved a more con-
centrated poetry.

2. Transference of Values /row one field of experience to an-

43

other and unrelated field. I shall illustrate this procedure with
passages from Crane's poem, The Dance.21 The poem opens with
the description of a journey first by canoe down the Hudson, then
on foot into the mountains. As the protagonist, or narrator, pro-
ceeds on his way, he appears to proceed likewise into the past,
until he arrives at the scene of an Indian dance, at which a chief-
tain, Maquokeeta, is being burned at the stake. The poem from
this point on deals with the death and apotheosis of Maquokeeta,
the apotheosis taking the form of a union with Pocahontas, who
has been introduced in this poem and in the poem preceding,
The River, as a kind of mythic deity representing the American
soil. The following passage is the climax and the most striking
moment in the poem:

O, like the lizard in the furious noon,

That drops his legs and colors in the sun,

—And laughs, pure serpent, Time itself, and moon

Of his own fate, I saw thy change loegunl

And saw thee dive to kiss that destiny
Like one white meteor, sacrosanct and blent
At last with all that's consummate and free
There where the first and last gods keep thy tent.

The remainder of the poem develops the same theme and the
same mood. The following phrases are typical :

Thy freedom is her largesse, Prince . . .
And are her perfect brows to thine? . . .

The difficulty resides in the meaning of the union. It may be
regarded in either of two ways: as the simple annihilation and
dissolution in the soil of Maquokeeta, or as the entrance into
another and superior mode of life. There is no possible com-
promise.

If we select the former alternative, the language of mystical
"From The Bridge, by Hart Crane. Horace Liveright, N. Y.: 1930.
44

and physical union has no relationship to the event: it is lan-
guage carried over, with all or a good deal of its connotation, from
two entirely different realms of experience. The passage is thus
parasitic for its effect upon feelings unrelated to its theme. The
words consummate and free, for example, carry the connotations
common to them, but their rational meaning in this context is
terminated and dissipated. Sacrosanct, similarly, while carrying
certain feelings from its religious past, would mean devoid of hu-
man meaning, or, more concisely, devoid of meaning. Similarly,
perfect, in the last line quoted, carries feelings from love poetry,
but it would actually signify meaningless. In other words, extinc-
tion is beatitude. But this is nonsense: extinction is extinction. If
there is a state of beatitude, it is a state; that is, it is not extinction.

If we accept the second alternative and assume that some really
mystical experience is implied, there is nothing in the poem or
elsewhere in Crane's work to give us a clue to the nature of the
experience. The only possible conclusion is that he was confused
as to his own feelings and did not bother to find out what he was
really talking about. That odd bits of this obscurity can be glossed
I am fully aware; but it cannot be cleaned up to an extent even
moderately satisfactory. There is a wide margin of obscurity and
of meaningless excitement, despite a certain splendor of language
which may at times move one to forget, or to try to forget, what
the poem lacks.

Further, there seems actually little doubt that Crane did con-
fuse in some way the ideas of extinction and of beatitude, and
that he was an enthusiastic pantheistical mystic. The mere fact
that beatitude is represented in this poem by the union with
Pocahontas, who stands for the soil of America, is evidence in
itself; and further evidence may be found in The River and in
some of the shorter poems. But one does not create a religion and
a conception of immortality simply by naming the soil Pocahontas
and by then writing love poetry to the Indian girl who bore that
name. Crane repeatedly refers to an idea which he cannot define
and which probably never had even potential existence.

A similar difficulty occurs in Atlantis, the final section of The
Bridge, the sequence of which The Dance and The River are

45

central parts. The Brooklyn Bridge is seen in a kind of vision or
hallucination as the new Atlantis, the future America. The lan-
guage is ecstatic; at certain moments and in certain ways it comes
near to being the most brilliant language in Craned work:

Like hails, farewells— up planet-sequined heights
Some trillion whispering hammers glimmer Tyre:
Serenely, sharply up the long anvil cry
Of inchling &ons silence rivets Troy . . .

But the only poetic embodiment of the future, the only source of
the ecstacy, is a quantitative vision of bigger cities with higher
buildings. One can read a certain amount of allegory into this,
but in so far as one makes the allegory definite or comprehensible,
one will depart from the text; the enthusiasm again is obscure.

3. Reference to a non-existent plot. This is most easily illus-
trated by selections from T. S. Eliot. I quote from Gerontion:2~

To he eaten, to be divided, to he drunk
Among -whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.

Each one of these persons is denoted in the performance of an
act, and each act, save possibly that of Hakagawa, implies an
anterior situation, is a link in a chain of action; even that of
Hakagawa implies an anterior and unexplained personality. Yet
we have no hint of the nature of the history implied. A feeling is
claimed by the poet, the motivation, or meaning, of which is
with-held, and of which in all likelihood he has no clearer notion

* Poems 1 909- 1925, by T. S. Eliot.
46

than his readers can have. I do not wish to seem to insist that Mr.
Eliot should have recounted the past histories in order to perfect
this particular poem. Given the convention, the modus operandi,
the obscurity is inevitable, and compared to the obscurity which
we have just seen in Crane, it is relatively innocent. But obscur-
ity it is: discreetly modulated diffuseness. A more direct and
economical convention seems to me preferable.

Mr. Eliot does much the same thing, but less skillfully, else-
where. The following passage is from Burhank with a Baedecker;
Bleistein with a Cigar:23

Eurbank crossed, a little bridge,

Descending at a small hotel;
Princess Volupine arrived,

They were together, and he fell.

What is the significance of the facts in the first two lines? They
have no real value as perception: the notation is too perfunctory.
They must have some value as information, as such details might
have value, for example, in a detective story, if they are to have
any value at all. Yet they have no bearing on what follows; in
fact, most of what follows is obscure in exactly the same way.
They are not even necessary to what occurs in the next two lines,
for Princess Volupine might just as well have encountered him
anywhere else and after any other transit.

4. Explicit Reference to a non-existent symbolic value. The
following lines are taken from a poem entitled Museum,24 by
Mr. Alan Porter:

The day was empty. Very pale with dust,
A chalk road set its finger at the moors.
The drab, damp air so blanketed the town
Never an oak swung leather leaf. The chimneys

38 Poems 1 909- J 925, by T. S. Eliot.

** Signature of Pain, by Alan Porter. The John Day Company: New York:
1931.

47

Pushed up their pillars at the loose-hung sky;
And through the haze, along the ragstone houses,
Red lichens dulled to a rotten-apple brown.

Suddenly turning a byeway corner, a cripple,
Bloodless with age, lumbered along the road.
The motes of dust whirled at his iron-shod crutches
And quickly settled. A dog whined. The old
Cripple looked round, and, seeing no man, gave
A quick, small piping chuclde, swung a pace,
And stopped to look about and laugh again.
"That," said a girl in a flat voice, "is God."
Her mother made no answer; she remembered,
"I knew an old lame beggar who went mad."
He lumbered along the road and turned a corner.
His tapping faded and the day was death.

This poem is ably written and has an unusually fine texture; in
fact, it is the texture of the entire work which provides the effec-
tive setting for the factitious comment on the beggar, and the
comment is introduced with great skill. The landscape is intense
and mysterious, as if with meaning withheld. In such a setting,
the likening of the beggar to God appears, for an instant, por-
tentous, but only for an instant, for there is no discernible basis
for the likening. The beggar is treated as if he were symbolic of
something, whereas he is really symbolic of nothing that one can
discover. The introduction of the beggar appears to be a very
skillful piece of sleight-of-hand; yet it is not an incidental detail
of the description, but is rather the climax of the description, the
theme of the poem. We have, in other words, a rather fine poem
about nothing.

5. Implicit Reference to a non-existent symbolic value. It may
be difficult at times to distinguish this type of pseudo-reference
from the last or from the type which I have designated under the

heading of transferred value. I shall merely endeavor to select
examples as obvious as possible.

There is, in the first place, such a thing as implicit reference to
a genuine symbolic value. The second sonnet in Heredia's Tro-
phdes, the sonnet entitled Nemee, describes the slaying of the
Nemean lion by Hercules. Hercules is the typical hero; the slay-
ing of the lion is the heroic task; the fleeing peasant is the com-
mon mortal for whom the task is performed. It is nakedly and
obviously allegorical, yet there is no statement within the poem
of the allegorical intention: it is our familiarity with the myth
and with other similar myths which makes us recognize the poem
as allegory. Similarly, there is no statement of allegorical inten-
tion within Blake's poem, The Tiger: the recognition of the in-
tention is due to Blake's having been fairly explicit in other
works.

Further, it is possible to describe an item with no past history
in such a way that it will have a significance fairly general. This
is the procedure of a handful of the best poems of the Imagist
movement; for example, of Dr. Williams' poem, On the road to
the contagious hospital. Thus Miss Moore describes a parakeet, in
the poem entitled My Apish Cousins:

the parakeet,
trivial and humdrum on examination,

destroying
hark and portions of the food it could not eat.

There is also the legitimate field of purely descriptive poetry,
with no general significance and no claim to any. For examples,
one could cite many passages from The Seasons, or from Crabbe.
There is no attempt in such poetry to communicate any feeling
save the author's interest in visible beauties. Such poetry can
scarcely rise to the greatest heights, but within its field it is sound,
and it can, as in some of Crabbe's descriptions, especially of the
sea, achieve surprising power. There is a good deal of this sort of
thing scattered through English literature.

49

Growing out of these two types of poetry (that which refers to
a genuine symbolic value, but implicitly, and the purely descrip-
tive), there is a sentimental and more or less spurious variety, a
good deal of which was recently fostered by the Imagist move-
ment, but which actually antedates the Imagist movement by
more than a century.

This poetry describes landscape or other material, sometimes
very ably, but assumes a quality or intensity of feeling of which
the source is largely obscure. Thus in Collins' Ode to Evening we
find a melancholy which at moments, as in the description of the
bat, verges on disorder, and which at all times is far too profound
to arise from an evening landscape alone. Collins' bat differs
from Miss Moore's parakeet in this: that the parakeet is a gen-
uine example of the way in which the exotic may become hum-
drum with familiarity— there is, in other words, a real perception
of the bird involved, which does not exceed the order of experi-
ence which the bird may reasonably represent; whereas Collins'
bat is not mad nor a sufficient motive for madness, but is used to
express a state of mind irrelevant to him. It is as if a man should
murder his mother, and then, to express his feelings, write an
Ode to Thunder. Or rather, it is as if a man should murder his
mother with no consciousness of the act, but with all of the con-
sequent suffering, and should then so express himself. A symbol
is used to embody a feeling neither relevant to the symbol nor
relevant to anything else of which the poet is conscious : the poet
expresses his feeling as best he is able without understanding it.
Collins in this poem, and in his odes to the disembodied passions,
is perhaps the first purely romantic poet and one of the best. He
does not, like Gray, retain amid his melancholy any of the classi-
cal gift for generalization, and he has provided the language with
no familiar quotations. Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, and in
a measure Keats' Ode to the Nightingale, are examples of the
same procedure; namely, of expressing a feeling, not as among
the traditional poets in terms of its motive, but in terms of some-
thing irrelevant or largely so, commonly landscape. No landscape,
in itself, is an adequate motive for the feelings expressed in such
poems as these; an appropriate landscape merely brings to mind

50

certain feelings and is used as a symbol for their communication.
The procedure can be defended on the grounds that the feeling
may be universal and that the individual reader is at liberty to
supply his own motive; but the procedure nevertheless does not
make for so concentrated a poetry as the earlier method, and as
an act of moral contemplation the poem is incomplete and may
even be misleading and dangerous.

H. D. employs a formula nearly identical with that of Collins
in most of her poems. In describing a Greek landscape, she fre-
quently writes as if it had some intrinsic virtue automatically
evoked by a perception of its qualities as landscape but more im-
portant than these qualities in themselves. It is not Greek history
or civilization with which she is concerned, or most often it is
not: the material is simple and more or less ideally bucolic. Fre-
quently the ecstasy (the quality of feeling assumed is nearly
identical in most of her poems) is evoked merely by rocks, sea,
and islands. But it would not be evoked by any rock, sea, or
islands: they must be Greek. But why must they be Greek? Be-
cause of Athenian civilization? If so, why the to-do about material
irrelevant to Athenian civilization? There is some wholly obscure
attachment on the poet's part to anything Greek, regardless of its
value: the mention of anything Greek is sufficient to release her
very intense feeling. But since the relationship between the feel-
ing and the Greek landscape has no comprehensible source and is
very strong, one must call it sentimental.

This is not to say that all her poetry is spoiled by it: much of
it is spoiled and nearly all is tainted, but the taint is sometimes
very slight; and the description, in addition, is sometimes very
fine. Exotic landscapes of one kind or another have been em-
ployed in exactly this fashion for about a century, and, in Amer-
ica, the American landscape has been so employed by such
writers as Whitman, Sandburg, Crane, and Williams.

6. Explicit Reference to a non-existent or obscure principle of
motivation. This may at times be hard to distinguish from almost
any of the types of obscurity which I have described, but there
are to be found occasionally passages of pseudo-reference which
will fit into scarcely any other category. Bearing in mind the

fundamental obscurity of The Dance, by Hart Crane, an obscu-
rity which I have already discussed at some length, let us consider
these two lines from it:

Mythical brows we saw retiring— loth,
Disturbed, and destined, into denser green.

This passage depends for its effect wholly upon the feeling of
motivation.

The mythical has rational content for the believer in myths or
for him who can find an idea embodied in the myth. The major
Greek divinities exist for us chiefly as allegorical embodiments of
more or less Platonic ideas. What myths have we in mind here?
None. Or none unless it be the myth of Pocahontas, which, as
we have seen, is irreducible to any idea. There is merely a feeling
of mythicalness.

Loth, disturbed, destined are words of motivation; that is, each
one implies a motive. But the nature of the motive is not given
in the poem, nor is it deducible from the poem nor from the
body of Crane's work. In fact, it is much easier to read some sort
of general meaning into these lines in isolation than in their
context, which has already been discussed.

Such terms give, then, a feeling of reasonable motivation un-
reasonably obscured. The poet speaks as if he had knowledge
incommunicable to us, but of which he is able to communicate
the resultant feelings. There is a feeling of mystery back of an
emotion which the poet endeavors to render with precision. It is
a skillful indulgence in irresponsibility. The skill is admirable,
but not the irresponsibility. The poetry has a ghostly quality, as
if it were only half there.

7. Reference to a purely private symbolic value. A poet, some-
times because of the limitations of his education, and sometimes
for other reasons, may center his feelings in symbols shared with
no one, or perhaps only with a small group. The private symbol
may or may not refer to a clear concept or understanding. If it
does so refer and the poetry is otherwise good, readers are likely
eventually to familiarize themselves with the symbols; in fact

brilliant writing alone will suffice to this end, as witness the
efforts that have been made to clarify the essentially obscure
concepts of Blake and of Yeats. A certain amount of this kind of
thing, in fact, is probably inevitable in any poet, and sometimes,
as in the references to private experience in the sonnets of Shake-
speare, the obscurity, as a result of the accidents of history, can
never be penetrated.

I have illustrated one extreme type of pseudo-reference with a
passage from Ben Jonson; I might have utilized also the "mad
songs" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as were
written by Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Herrick. Samuel Johnson
wrote thus in his Life of Dryden: "Dryden delighted to tread
upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness mingle.
. . . This inclination sometimes produced nonsense, which he
knew; and sometimes it issued in absurdity, of which perhaps he
was not conscious." The method appears, then, to have been for a
long time one of the recognized potentialities of poetic writing,
but to have been more or less checked by the widespread com-
mand of rational subject matter.

It should naturally have been released, as it appears to have
been, by a period of amateur mysticism, of inspiration for its
own sake, by a tendency such as that which we have for some
years past observed, to an increasingly great preoccupation with
the fringe of consciousness, to an increasing emphasis on the
concept of continuous experience, a tendency to identify, under
the influence, perhaps, of scientific or of romantic monism, sub-
conscious stimuli and reactions with occult inspiration, to con-
fuse the divine and the visceral, and to employ in writing from
such attitudes as this confusion might provide, a language previ-
ously reserved to the religious mystics. Such a change would
involve along its way such indefinable philosophies as Bergson-
ism25 and Transcendentalism,26 such half-metaphorical sciences

* Le Bergsonisme, by Julien Benda. Mercure de France: 1926. Also Flux
and, Blur in Contemporary Art, by John Crowe Ransom in the Sewanee
Review, July, 1929.

"H. B. Parkes on Emerson, in the Hound and Horn, Summer, 1932; in-
cluded in The Pragmatic Test, by H. B. Parkes, The Colt Press, San Francisco,
1942.

as psychoanalysis, and especially the popular myths and supersti-
tions which they and the more reputable sciences have engen-
dered. In such an intellectual milieu, semi-automatic writing he-
gins to appear a legitimate and even a superior method.

Emerson, in Merlin, for example, gives this account of the
bard's activity:

He shall not his brain encumber

With the coil of rhythm and number;

But, leaving rule and pale forethought,

He shall aye climb

For his rhyme.

"Pass in, pass in," the angels say,

"In to the upper doors,

Nor count compartments of the floors,

But mount to paradise

By the stairway of surprise."

Just how much Emerson meant by this passage it would be hard
to say; it is always hard to say just how much Emerson meant,
and perhaps would have been hardest for Emerson. Mr. Tate
reduces Emerson's Transcendentalism27 to this formula: ". . .
In Emerson, man is greater than any idea, and being the Over-
Soul is potentially perfect; there is no struggle because— I state
the Emersonian doctrine, which is very slippery, in its extreme
terms— because there is no possibility of error. There is no drama
in human character, because there is no tragic fault/'

To continue with extreme terms— which will give us, if not
what Emerson desired, the results which his doctrine and others
similar have encouraged— we arrive at these conclusions: If there
is no possibility of error, the revision of judgment is meaning-
less; immediate inspiration is correct; but immediate inspiration
amounts to the same thing as unrevised reactions to stimuli; un-
revised reactions are mechanical; man in a state of perfection is

27 New England Culture and Emily Dickinson, by Allen Tate : The Sym-
posium, April, 1932. Reprinted in a somewhat revised form in Reactionary Es-
says on Poetry and Ideas, by Allen Tate, Scribners, 1936.

54

an automaton; an automatic man is insane. Hence, Emerson's
perfect man is a madman.

The important thing about all this is not Emerson's originality,
but his complete lack of any: exactly the same conclusions are
deducible from the Essay on Man, and the convictions which
lead to them one meets everywhere in the eighteenth, nine-
teenth, and twentieth centuries.

Dr. W. C. Williams, for example, who, like Emerson, does not
practice unreservedly what he preaches, but who more perhaps
than any writer living encourages in his juniors a profound con-
viction of their natural Tightness, a sentimental debauchery of
self-indulgence, is able to write as follows: "It is the same thing
you'll see in a brigand, a criminal of the grade of Gerald Chap-
man, some of the major industrial leaders, old-fashioned kings,
the Norsemen, drunkards and the best poets. . . . Poetry is im-
posed on an age by men intent on something else, whose primary
cleanliness of mind makes them automatically first-rate." 28

A few months later Dr. Williams writes of and to his young
admirers somewhat querulously:29 'Instead of that— Lord how
serious it sounds— let's play tiddly-winks with the syllables. . . .
Experiment we must have, but it seems to me that a number of
the younger writers has iorgotten that writing doesn't mean just
inventing new ways to say 'So's your Old Man/ I swear I myself
can't make out for the life of me what many of them are talking
about, and I have a will to understand them that they will not
find in many another." He demands substance, not realizing that
his own teachings have done their very respectable bit toward
cutting the young men off from any.

The Emersonian and allied doctrines differ in their moral im-
plications very little from any form of Quietism or even from the
more respectable and Catholic forms of mysticism. If we add to
the doctrine the belief in pantheism— that is, the belief that the
Over-Soul is the Universe, that body and soul are one— we have

* Blues (published by C. H. Ford, at Columbus, Miss.) for May, 1929.

29 Blues for Autumn of 1930. The reference to the game of tiddly-winks will
be clear only to those persons familiar with the imitators of Mr. James Joyce's
fourth prose work, exclusive of Exiles, entitled Finnegans Wake.

55

the basis for the more or less Freudian mysticism of the surreal-
ists and such of their disciples as Eugene Jolas; we have also—
probably— a rough notion of Hart Crane's mysticism. There is
the danger for the Quietist that the promptings of the Devil or
of the viscera may be mistaken for the promptings of God. The
pantheistic mystic identifies God, Devil, and viscera as a point
of doctrine: he is more interested in the promptings of the "sub-
conscious" mind than of the conscious, in the half-grasped inten-
tion, in the fleeting relationship, than in that which is wholly
understood. He is interested in getting just as far off in the direc-
tion of the uncontrolled, the meaningless, as he can possibly get
and still have the pleasure of talking about it. He is frequently
more interested in the psychology of sleeping than in the psy-
chology of waking;30 he would if he could devote himself to
exploring that realm of experience which he shares with sea-
anemones, cabbages, and onions, in preference to exploring the
realm of experience shared specifically with men.

So far as my own perceptions are able to guide me, it appears
that the writers employing such methods are writing a little too
much as Jonson's alchemists spoke, with a philosophical back-
ground insusceptible of definition, despite their apparently care-
ful references to it, but as their own dupes, not to dupe others.
They have revised Baudelaire's dictum that the poet should be
the hypnotist and somnambulist combined; he should now be the
cozener and the cozened. Crane, despite his genius, and the same
is true of Mr. James Joyce, appears to answer Ben Jonson's
scoundrels across the centuries, and in their own language, but
like a somnambulist under their control.

This kind of writing is not a "new kind of poetry," as it has
been called perennially since Verlaine discovered it in Rimbaud.
It is the old kind of poetry with half the meaning removed. Its
strangeness comes from its thinness. Indubitable genius has been
expended upon poetry of this type, and much of the poetry so
written will more than likely have a long life, and quite justly,
but the nature of the poetry should be recognized: it can do us

90 Cf. Mr. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and the voluminous works by
Mr. Joyce's apologists and imitators.

56

no good to be the dupes of men who do not understand them-
selves.

Type V: QUALITATIVE PROGRESSION

THE TERM qualitative progression I am borrowing from Mr.
Kenneth Burked volume of criticism, Counter statement, to which
I have already had several occasions to refer. This method arises
from the same attitudes as the last, and it resembles the last ex-
cept that it makes no attempt whatever at a rational progression.
Mr. Pound's Cantos31 are the perfect example of the form; they
make no unfulfilled claims to matter not in the poetry, or at any
rate relatively few and slight claims. Mr. Pound proceeds from
image to image wholly through the coherence of feeling: his sole
principle of unity is mood, carefully established and varied. That
is, each statement he makes is reasonable in itself, but the pro-
gression from statement to statement is not reasonable: it is the
progression either of random conversation or of revery. This kind
of progression might be based upon an implicit rationality; in
such a case the rationality of the progression becomes clearly
evident before the poem has gone very far and is never there-
after lost sight of; in a poem of any length such implicit rational-
ity would have to be supported by explicit exposition. But in Mr.
Pound's poem I can find few implicit themes of any great clarity,
and fewer still that are explicit.82

81 A Draft of XXX Cantos, by Ezra Pound. Hours Press: 15 rue Guen^gaud:
Paris: 1930.

83 Mr. Pound, writing in The New English Weekly, Vol. Ill, No. 4, of re-
marks similar to the above which I published in The Hound and Horn for the
Spring of 1933, states: "I am convinced that one should not as a general rule
reply to critics or defend works in process of being written. On the other hand,
if one prints fragments of a work one perhaps owes the benevolent reader
enough explanation to prevent his wasting time in unnecessary misunder-
standing.

"The nadir of solemn and elaborate imbecility is reached by Mr. Winters in
an American publication where he deplores my 'abandonment of logic in the
Cantos,' presumably because he has never read my prose criticism and has never
heard of the ideographic method, and thinks logic is limited to a few 'forms of
logic' which better minds were already finding inadequate to the mental needs
of the Xlllth century."

As to the particular defects of scholarship which Mr. Pound attributes to

57

The principle of selection being less definite, the selection of
details is presumably less rigid, though many of the details dis-
play a fine quality. The symbolic range is therefore reduced, since
the form reduces the importance of selectiveness, or self-directed
action. The movement is proportionately slow and wavering—
indeed is frequently shuffling and undistinguished— and the
range of material handled is limited: I do not mean that the
poetry cannot refer to a great many types of actions and persons,
but that it can find in them little variety of value— it refers to
them all in the same way, that is, casually. Mr. Pound resembles
a village loafer who sees much and understands little.

The following passage, however, the opening of the fourth
Canto, illustrates this kind of poetry at its best:

Palace in smoky light,

Troy lout a heap of smouldering boundary stones,

ANAX1FORMINGES! Aurunculeia!

Hear me, Cadmus of Golden Prows!

The silv&r mirrors catch the bright stones and flare,

Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the cool green light;

Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving.

Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf under the apple-trees,

Choros nympharum, goat-foot, with the pale foot alternate;

Crescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the shallows,

A black cock crows in the sea- foam;

And by the curved, carved foot of the couch, claw-foot and

lion-head, an old man seated
Speaking in the low drone. . . . :

Ityn

Et ter ftebiliter, Ityn, Ityn!
And she went toward the window and cast her down

me, he is, alas, mistaken. For the rest, one may only say that civilization rests
on the recognition that language possesses both connotative and denotative
powers; that the abandonment or one in a poem impoverishes the poem to that
extent; and that the abandonment of the denotative, or rational, in particular,
and in a pure state, results in one's losing the only means available for check-
ing up on the qualitative or "ideographic" sequences to see if they really are
coherent in more than vague feeling. Mr. Pound, in other words, nas no way
of knowing whether he can think or not.

58

"And the while, the while swallows crying:
Ityn!

"It is Cabestans heart in the dish."
"It is Cabestans heart in the dish?
"No other taste shall change this."

The loveliness of such poetry appears to me indubitable, but it is
merely a blur of revery: its tenuity becomes apparent if one
compares it, for example, to the poetry of Paul Val6ry, which
achieves effects of imagery, particularly of atmospheric imagery,
quite as extraordinary, along with precision, depth of meaning,
and the power that comes of close and inalterable organization,
and, though Mr. Pound's admirers have given him a great name
as a metrist, with incomparably finer effects of sound.

Mr. Kenneth Burke defines the qualitative progression33 by
means of a very fine analysis of the preparation for the ghost in
Hamlet and by reference to the porter scene in Macbeth, and
then proceeds to the public house scene in The Waste Land 34 as
if it were equally valid. Actually, the qualitative progression in
Shakespeare is peripheral, the central movement of each play
being dependent upon what Mr. Burke calls the psychology of
the hero, or narrative logic, and so firmly dependent that occa-
sional excursions into the rationally irrelevant can be managed
with no loss of force, whereas in The Waste Land the qualitative
progression is central: it is as if we should have a dislocated
series of scenes from Hamlet without the prince himself, or with
too slight an account of his history for his presence to be helpful.
The difference between Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound is this: that in
The Waste Land, the prince is briefly introduced in the foot-
notes, whereas it is to be doubted that Mr. Pound could jnanage
such an introduction were he so inclined. And the allegorical
interpretation, or the germ of one, which Mr. Eliot has provided
helps very little in the organization of the poem itself. To guess
that the rain has a certain allegorical meaning when the rain is
so indifferently described, or to guess at the allegorical relation-

33 Counterstatement: page 38 and thereafter.
84 Poems 1909-25, by T. S. Eliot.

59

ships as a scholar might guess at the connections between a dozen
odd pages recovered from a lost folio, is of very small aid to our-
selves or to the poet.

If Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound have employed conventions that
can be likened to revery or to random conversation, Rimbaud
and Mr. Joyce have gone farther. I quote Rimbaud's Larme:

Loin des oiseaux, des troupeaux, des villageoises,
Je buvais accroupi dans qu&lque bmy&re
Entouree de tendres bois de noisetiers,
Par un brouillard dapres-midi tiede et vert.

Que pouvais-je boire dans cette jeune Oise,
Ormeaux sans voix, gazon sans fleurs, del convert:
Que tirais-je a la gourde de colocase?
Quelque liqueur dor, fade et qui fait suer.

Tel. j'eusse 6te mauvaise enseigne d'auberge.
Puis Vorage changea le del jusqu au soir.
Ce furent des pays noirs, des lacs, des perches,
Des colonnades sous la nuit bleye, des gares.

L'eau des bois se perdait sur les sables vierges.
Le vent, du del, jetait des glagons aux mares . . .
Or! tel quun pgcheur d'or ou de coquillages,
Dire que je nai pas eu souci de boirel

The feelings of this poem are perhaps those attendant upon
dream, delirium, or insanity. The coming of night and the storm
is an intensification of the mood; the protagonist is suddenly
sucked deeper in the direction of complete unconsciousness, and
the terror becomes more profound.

In Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, the dream convention is
unmistakable. It penetrates the entire texture of the work, not
only the syntax but the words themselves, which are broken
down and recombined in surprising ways,
60

This unbalance of the reasonable and the non-reasonable,
whether the non-reason be of the type which I am now dis-
cussing or of the pseudo-referent type, is a vice wherever it oc-
curs, and in the experimental writers who have worked very far
in this direction, it is, along with Laforguian irony, which I shall
discuss separately, one of the two most significant vices of style
now flourishing. The reasons have already been mentioned here
and there, but I shall summarize them.

Since only one aspect of language, the connotative, is being
utilized, less can be said in a given number of words than if the
denotative aspect were being fully utilized at the same time. The
convention thus tends to diffuseness. Further, when the denota-
tive power of language is impaired, the connotative becomes pro-
portionately parasitic upon denotations in previous contexts, for
words cannot have associations without meanings; and if the de-
notative power of language could be wholly eliminated, the
connotative would be eliminated at the same stroke, for it is the
nature of associations that they are associated with something.
This means that non-rational writing, far from requiring greater
literary independence than the traditional modes, encourages a
quality of writing that is relatively derivative and insecure.

Since one of the means to coherence, or form, is impaired, form
itself is enfeebled. In so far as form is enfeebled, precision of de-
tail is enfeebled, for details receive precision from the structure
in which they function just as they may be employed to give that
structure precision; to say that detail is enfeebled is to say that
the power of discrimination is enfeebled. Mr. Joyce's new prose
has sensitivity, for Mr. Joyce is a man of genius, but it is the
sensitivity of a plasmodium, in which every cell squirms inde-
pendently though much like every other. This statement is a very
slight exaggeration if certain chapters are considered, notably the
chapter entitled Anna Livia Plurabelle, but for the greater part it
is no exaggeration.

The procedure leads to indiscriminateness at every turn. Mr.
Joyce endeavors to express disintegration by breaking down his
form, by experiencing disintegration before our very eyes, but
this destroys much of his power of expression. Of course he con-

61

trols the extent to which he impairs his form, but this merely
means that he is willing to sacrifice just so much power of expres-
sion—in an effort to express something— and no more. He is like
Whitman trying to express a loose America by writing loose
poetry. This fallacy, the fallacy of expressive, or imitative, form,
recurs constantly in modern literature.

Anna Livia Plurabelle is in a sense a modern equivalent of
Gray's Elegy, one in which the form is expressive of the theme to
an unfortunate extent; it blurs the values of all experience in the
fact of change, and is unable, because of its inability to deal with
rational experience, to distinguish between village Cromwells
and the real article, between Othello on the one hand and on the
other hand Shem and Shaun. It leads to the unlimited sub-
division of feelings into sensory details till perception is lost, in-
stead of to the summary and ordering of perception; it leads to
disorganization and unintelligence. In Mr. Joyce we may observe
the decay of genius. To the form of decay his genius lends a be-
guiling iridescence, and to his genius the decay lends a quality
of novelty/which endanger the literature of our time by render-
ing decay attractive.

Mr. T. S. Eliot, in his introduction to the Anabase of St. Jean
Perse,35 has written : 'There is a logic of the imagination as well
as a logic of concepts. People who do not appreciate poetry al-
ways find it difficult to distinguish between order and chaos in
the arrangement of images." Later in the same essay he says: "I
believe that this is a piece of writing of the same importance as
the later work of Mr. James Joyce, as valuable as Anna Livia
Plurabelle. And this is a high estimate indeed/'

The logic in the arrangement of images of which Mr. Eliot
speaks either is formulable, is not formulable, or is formulated.
If it is neither formulated nor formulable (and he admits that it
is not formulated), the word logic is used figuratively, to indicate
qualitative progression, and the figure is one which it is hard to
pardon a professed classicist for using at the present time. If the
logic is formulable, there is no need for an apology and there is

* Anabasis, a poem by St. Jean Perse, with translation and Preface by T. S.
Eliot. Faber and Faber, London: 1930.

62

no excuse for the reference to Anna Livia Plurabelle; and there is
reason to wonder why no formulation is given or suggested by
the critic. Mr. Eliot has reference obviously, merely to the type
of graduated progression of feeling that we have been discussing,
and the poem shares the weakness of other works already dis-
cussed.

Mr. Eliot's remarks are typical of the evasive dallying prac-
ticed by the greater number of even the most lucid and reaction-
ary critics of our time when dealing with a practical problem of
criticism. It is well enough to defend Christian morality and to
speak of tradition, but forms must be defined and recognized or
the darkness remains. A classicist may admire the sensibilities of
Joyce and Perse with perfect consistency (though beyond a cer-
tain point not with perfect taste), but he cannot with consistency
justify the forms which those sensibilities have taken.

If the reader is curious to compare with the Anabase a prose
work of comparable length and subject in the traditional man-
ner, he will find a specimen of the highest merit in The Destruc-
tion of Tenochtitlan36 by William Carlos Williams, which, like
the Anabase, deals with the military conquest of an exotic nation,
but which utilizes not only qualitative progression but every
other mode proper to narrative and in a masterly way. The form
is exact; the rhetoric is varied and powerful; the details, unlike
those of the Anabase, are exact both as description and, where
symbolic force is intended, as symbols. Displaying fullness and
precision of meaning, it is in no wise "strange" and has been
ignored. But its heroic prose is superior to the prose of Anabase
and of Anna Livia Plurabelle, is superior in all likelihood to
nearly any other prose of our time and to most of the verse.

The so-called stream-of-consciousness convention of the con-
temporary novel is a form of qualitative progression. It may or
may not be used to reveal a plot, but at best the revelation can be
fragmentary since the convention excludes certain important
functions of prose— summary, whether narrative or expository,

" In the American Grain, by W. C. Williams. A. and C. Boni, New York,
1925.

63

being the chief. It approximates the manner of the chain of
thought as it might be imagined in the mind of the protagonist:
that is, it tends away from the reconsidered, the revised, and
tends toward the fallacy of imitative form, which I have re-
marked in the work of Joyce and of Whitman.37 It emphasizes,
wittingly or not, abject imitation at the expense of art; it is tech-
nically naturalism; it emphasizes to the last degree the psy-
chology of the hero, but the least interesting aspect of it, the ac-
cidental. Mr. Kenneth Burke, in his novel, Toward a Better
Life*8 thus falls into the very pit which he has labored most
diligently to avoid: he expends his entire rhetorical energy on his
sentences, but lets his story run loosely through the mind of his
hero. The quality of the detail is expository and aphoristic; the
structure is not expository but is qualitative. One feels a discrep-
ancy between the detail and the form; the detail appears labored,
the form careless and confused.

The convention of reminiscence, a form of the stream-of-
consciousness technique, which is employed by. Mr. Burke and
by others, fras a defect peculiar to itself alone. It commonly in-
volves the assumption, at the beginning of a story, of the state
of feeling proper to the conclusion; then by means of revelation,
detail by detail, the feeling is justified. In other words, the initial
situations are befogged by unexplained feeling, and the feeling
does not develop in a clean relationship to the events. The result
is usually a kind of diffuse lyricism.

Type VI: THE ALTERNATION OF METHOD

Two OR MORE METHODS may be used in formal arrangements. In
a play or novel, where there is plenty of room for change, a great

87 This law of literary aesthetics has never that I know been stated explicitly.
It might be thus formulated: Form is expressive invariably of the state of mind
of the author; a state of formlessness is legitimate subject matter for literature,
and in- fact all subject matter, as such, is relatively formless; but the author must
endeavor to give form, or meaning, to the formless— in so far as he endeavors
that his own state of mind may imitate or approximate the condition of the
matter, he is surrendering to the matter instead of mastering it. Form, in so far
as it endeavors to imitate the formless, destroys itself.

88 Op. cit.

64

many modes of procedure may be employed. In a lyrical poem
there will seldom be more than two. In Marvell's To His Coy
Mistress, for example, the progression from stanza to stanza is
logical, but within each stanza the progression is repetitive.

Mallarm6's L'Apr&s-Midi d'un Faune illustrates a method to-
ward which various writers have tended; namely to shift out of
the logical into the pseudo-referent or qualitative, back into the
logical, and so on, but at irregular intervals. The appearance of
shifting may be due, of course, to my own inability to follow the
argument, but it appears to be a real shifting. The faun recounts
his adventure, trying to philosophize concerning it: hence narra-
tive alternates with what should be exposition, but actually both
narrative and exposition move in a more or less dreamy fashion
at times, so that the cleavage in method does not coincide with
the cleavage in subject matter.

Type VII: THE DOUBLE MOOD

A SHORT POEM or passage may be composed of alternating pas-
sages of two distinct and more or less opposed types of feeling,
or of two types of feeling combined and without discernible
alternation. A long poem may involve many types of feeling, but
where two types alone are involved, one of them is usually
ironic: it is with this situation in particular that I am here con-
cerned. Byron, for example, commonly builds up a somewhat
grandiloquent effect only to demolish it by ridicule or by ludi-
crous anticlimax. His effects are crude in the main, the poems
being ill-written, but he was the first poet to embody on a pre-
tentious scale, and to popularize, this common modern attitude.

The particular form which his method has taken in modern
poetry is closely related to the poetry of Jules Laforgue, though
Laforgue is not in every case an influence. I quote Laforgue's
Complainte du Printemps:

Permettez, 6 sir&ne,
Void que votre haleine
Embaume la verveine;
C'est le printem'ps qui sam&nel

65

— Ce syst&me, en effet, ram&ne le printemps,
Avec son impudent cortege d* excitants.

Otez done ces mitaines;
Et riayez, inhumaine,
Que mes soughs your traine:
Ousquil y a dela g&ne . . .

—Ahl yeux bleus meditant sur V ennui de leur art/
Et vous, jeunes divins, aux soirs crus de hasardl

Du geant & la naine,
Vois, tout loon sire entraine
Quelque contemporaine,
Prendre I' air, par hygiene . . .

—Mais vous saignez ainsi pour I 'amour de I'exil!
Pour Vamour de I'Amourl D'ailleurs, ainsi soit-il . . .

T'ai-je fait de la peine?
Oh! viens vers les fontaines
Ou tournent les phal&nes
Des nuits Elysdennesl

—Pimb&che aux yeux vaincus, belldtre aux beaux jarrets,
Donnez votre fumier a la fteur du Regret.

Voila que son haleine
N'embaum plus la verveine!
Drdle de ph6nom&ne . . .
Hein, d Vannee prochaine?

Vierges d'hier, ce soir traineuses de foetus,
A genouxl void I'heure ou se plaint l'Ang£lus.

Nous n irons plus au bois,
Les pins sont eternels,
66

Les cors ant des appels! . . .
Neiges des fdles mois,
Vous serez mon missel!
—Jusquau jour du degel.

The opposition and cancellation of the two moods is so obvious
as to need no particular comment: there is romantic nostalgia
(romantic because it has no discernible object, is a form of un-
motivated feeling) canceled by an immature irony (immature
because it depends upon the obviously but insignificantly ridicu-
lous, as in the third quatrain, or upon a kind of physical detail
which is likely to cause pain to the adolescent but which is not
likely to interest the mature, as in couplets four and five). The
application of the irony, in turn, deepens the nostalgia, as in the
fourth quatrain and the conclusion. It is the formula for adoles-
cent disillusionment: the unhappily "cynical" reaction to the loss
of a feeling not worth having.

A few years earlier than Laforgue, Tristan Corbi&re had em-
ployed the same procedure in a few poems, most vigorously in
Un Jeune Qui S'en Va, but from his greatest work (La Raysode
Foraine and Cris d'Aveugle, two poems which are probably su-
perior to any French verse of the nineteenth century save the
best of Baudelaire), it is either absent or has lost itself amid an
extremely complex cluster of feelings.

Previously to Corbi&re, Gautier had written in much the same
fashion, but usually of very different subjects. His Nostalgies des
Obelisques are examples. They consist of two poems, mono-
logues spoken by two Egyptian obelisks, one of which has been
transported to Paris and compares the Parisian and Egyptian
scenes, lamenting the loss of the latter, the other of which re-
mains behind, only to make the same comparison but to long
for Paris. The alternations are almost mathematically balanced, .
though occasionally both moods will rest on a single image, as
when an Egyptian animal performs a grotesquely ludicrous ac-
tion in magnificent language. There is not, in Gautier, the ado-
lescent mood of Laforgue, for Gautier was a vastly abler rhetori-
cian and was too astute to give way to such a mood, but there is

no meaning to his experience, as it appears in such poems, out-
side of the contrast, and the contrast is painfully precise. Gautier
resembles a child fascinated by the task of separating and arrang-
ing exactly, blocks of exactly two colors. The moral sense of such
a poet is too simple to hold the interest for many readings. Mr.
Eliot in his quatrains employed the same formula; in fact several
of his most striking lines are translated or imitated from Emaux
et Camees?*

Similar to Laforgue's use of this kind of irony is Mr. Pound's
use of it in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.4Q The two attitudes at vari-
ance in this sequence are a nostalgic longing of which the visible
object is the society of the Pre-Raphaelites and of the related
poets of the nineties, and a compensatory irony which admits the
mediocrity of that society or which at least ridicules its mediocre
aspects. Even in the midst of the most biting comment, the
yearning is unabated:

The Burne-Jones cartons
Have preserved her eyes;
Still, at the Tate, they teach
C&phetua to rhapsodize;

Thin, like brook-water,

With a vacant gaze.

The English Rubaiyat was still-born

In those days.41

And again, to quote an entire poem:

Among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones

Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,

I found the last scion of the

Senatorial families of Strassbourg, Monsieur Verog.

88 Poems 1909-25, by T. S. Eliot: the series of poems in octosyllabic quat-
rains, of which the most successful is Sweeney among the Nightingales.

"Hugh Selwyn Mavberly, by Ezra Pound. Included in Persons, by Ezra
Pound. Boni and Liveright. New York. 1926.

uYewc Glauqes, from Mannerly.

68

For two hours he talked of Gallifet;
Of Dowson; Of the Rhymers' Club;
Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub . . .

But showed no trace of alcohol

At the autopsy, privately performed—

Tissues preserved— the pure mind

Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.

Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;

Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued

With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore, and the Church

So spoke the author of <(The Dorian Mood,"

M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.42

As so often happens when this kind of irony occurs, the poem is
guilty of a certain amount both of doggerel and of verbosity. It
is not without virtues, however; and it is not the best poem in
the sequence. It is worth noting that the two moods are not pre-
cisely separable here, as in so much of Eliot and of Gautier, but
are usually coincident. This likewise is true of the irony of Wal-
lace Stevens.

Mr. Stevens' commonest method of ironic comment is to parody
his own style, with respect to its slight affectation of elegance; or
perhaps it were more accurate to say that this affectation itself is
a parody, however slight, of the purity of his style in its best
moments. The parody frequently involves an excess of allitera-
tion, as in the opening lines of the poem entitled Of the Manner
of Addressing Clouds:43

43 "Siena Mi Fe': Disfecemi Maremma." The same.

"This poem and others by the same author may be found in: Harmonium,
by Wallace Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1931.

69

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous. . . .

The same device is more obviously employed in The Comedian
as the Letter C, in which appears an explicit statement of the
source of the irony, his inability to justify the practice of his art,
his own lack of respect for what he is doing, and in which the
irony frequently descends to the tawdry. In some poems he is
entirely free of the quality, as, for examples, in Sunday Morning,
Death of a Soldier, Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb. In such
work, and in those poems such as that last quoted and, to choose
a more ambitious example, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, in which
the admixture is very slight, he is probably the greatest poet of
his generation.

The double mood is not strictly post-romantic, either in Eng-
lish or in French, nor is ironic poetry, but both are perhaps more
frequently so, and in pre-romantic poetry neither is employed for
the purpose which I have been describing. For instance, in Dry-
den's MacFtecknoe, the combination of the heroic style and the
satirical intention constitutes a kind of double mood, but there
is no mutual cancellation; the same is true of Pope's Dunciad, of
La Pucelle by Voltaire, and of a good many other poems. Church-
ill's Dedication to Warburton, in its semblance of eulogy actu-
ally covering a very bitter attack, employs both irony (as distinct
from satire) and something that might be called a double mood.
But in all of these examples, the poet is perfectly secure in his
own feelings; he is attacking something or someone else from a
point of view which he regards as tenable. The essence of roman-
tic irony, on the other hand, is this: that the poet ridicules him-
self for a kind or degree of feeling which he can neither approve
nor control; so that the irony is simply the act of confessing a
state of moral insecurity which the poet sees no way to improve.44

A twentieth century ironist who resembles the earlier ironists
instead of her contemporaries is Miss Marianne Moore. If one

"The relationship and partial indebtedness of this technical analysis of
romantic irony to Irving Babbitt's more general treatment of the same subject
in Rousseau and Romanticism will be evident to anyone familiar with the
latter.

70

can trust the evidence of her earlier and shorter poems, she steins
from the early Elizabethan epigrammatists. Turberville, a few
years before Spenser and Sidney, writes To One of Little Wit:

I thee advise
If thou he wise
To keep thy wit
Though it be small.
'Tis hard to get
And far to fet—
'Twas ever yet
Dearst ware of all.

Miss Moore writes To an Intramural Rat:45

You make me think of many men
Once met, to he forgot again,

Or merely resurrected
In a parenthesis of wit
That found them hastening through it

Too brisk to he inspected.

In Miss Moore's later work, the same quality is developed
through a very elaborate structure, in which the magnificent and
the curious are combined with the ironical and the ludicrous: I
have in mind in particular such poems as My Apish Cousins
(later entitled The Monkey s), New York, A Grave, and Black
Earth. These poems illustrate perfectly Miss Moore's virtues: un-
shakable certainty of intention, a diction at once magnificent
and ironic (her cat, for example, in My Apish Cousins, raises
Gautier's formula for fantastic zoology into the realm of high
art), and the fairly consistent control of an elaborate rhetoric.
They suggest her weaknesses, which are more evident in other
poems: a tendency to a rhetoric more complex than her matter,
a tendency to be led astray by opportunities for description, and
a tendency to base her security on a view of manners instead of
morals.

48 Observations, by Marianne Moore, The Dial Press, New York, 1924.

71

The romantic antithesis of moods is the central theme of Joyce's
Ulysses, which, at the same time, is rendered diffuse by a stream-
of-consciousness technique and by the fallacy of imitative form.46
The book has great virtues, which its admirers have long since
fully enumerated, but it lacks final precision both of form and of
feeling. It is adolescent as Laforgue is adolescent; it is ironic about
feelings which are not worth the irony.

Mr. Kenneth Burke's novel, Towards a Better Life, displays
the same kind of irony, which adds to the confusion coming from
other sources which I have already mentioned. Mr. Burke, in-
stead of giving us the progression of a narrative, endeavors, as I
have said, to give us a progression of pure feeling. Frequently
there is not even progression; we have merely a repetitious series
of Laforguian antitheses.

Mr. Burke, in his volume of criticism, Counter statement, offers
the best defense with which I am familiar, of the attitudes to
which I am now objecting.47 He writes: "The ironist is essentially
impure, even in the chemical sense of purity, since he is divided.
He must deprecate his own enthusiasms, and distrust his own re-
sentments. He will unite waveringly, as the components of his
attitude, 'dignity, repugnance, the problematical, and art/ To the
slogan-minded, the ralliers about a flag, the marchers who con-
vert a simple idea into a simple action, he is an 'outsider/ Yet he
must observe them with nostalgia, he must feel a kind of awe for
their fertile assurance, even while remaining on the alert to stifle
it with irony each time he discovers it growing in unsuspected
quarters within himself/'

In admitting no distinction save that between the ironist and
the slogan-minded, Mr. Burke himself verges upon a dangerous
enthusiasm, perhaps even upon a slogan. The whole issue comes
down to the question of how carefully one is willing to scrutinize
his feelings and correct them. Miss Rowena Lockett once re-
marked to me that Laforgue resembles a person who speaks with
undue harshness and then apologizes; whereas he should have
made the necessary subtractions before speaking. The objection

46 Ulysses, by James Joyce, Shakespeare and Co., Paris.

47 In the essay on Thomas Mann and Andrd Gide, pages 116 and following.

7*

implies an attitude more sceptical and cautious than that of Mr.
Burke; instead of irony as the remedy for the unsatisfactory feel-
ing, it recommends the waste-basket and a new beginning. And
this recommendation has its basis not only in morality but in
aesthetics: the romantic ironists whom I have cited write imper-
fectly in proportion to their irony; their attitude, which is a cor-
ruption of feeling, entails a corruption of style— that is, the irony
is an admission of careless feeling, which is to say careless writ-
ing, and the stylist is weak in proportion to the grounds for his
irony. To see this, one has only to compare the best work of these
writers to the best of Churchill, Pope, Gay, Marot, or Voltaire.
Mr. Burke states elsewhere:48 "The 'sum total of art' relieves
the artist of the need of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole.
He will presumably desire to be as comprehensive as he can, but
what he lacks in adjustability can be supplied by another artist
affirming some other pattern with equal conviction/'

Except for the likelihood that two opposite excesses may not be
equivalent to something intelligent, Mr. Burke's statement may
up to a certain point be well enough for Society (whatever the
word may mean in this connection), but from the standpoint of
the individual seeking to train himself, it is not very helpful.

Mr. Burke does give the artist a morality, however: he bases it
upon what he believes Society needs: "Alignment of forces. On
the side of the practical: efficiency, prosperity, material acquisi-
tions, increased consumption, 'new needs/ expansion, higher
standards of living, progressive rather than regressive evolutions,
in short ubiquitous optimism. . . . On the side of the aesthetic
(the Bohemian): inefficiency, indolence, dissipation, vacillation,
mockery, distrust, 'hypochondria/ non-conformity, bad sports-
manship, in short, negativism. We have here a summary of the
basic notion of all of Mr. Burke's writings, the doctrine of bal-
anced excesses. Perhaps they will balance each other, and perhaps
not, but suppose a man should desire to be intelligent with regard
to himself alone; suppose, in other words, a particular artist
should lack entirely the high altruism which Mr. Burke demands
of him— of what value will he find Mr. Burke's morality? Mr.

18 Counterstatement: the chapter called Lexicon Rhetoricae: page 231.

73

Burke's doctrine, in the realms of art and of morality, is really the
least sceptical, the most self-confident possible: no point of view is
tenable and hence no feeling is adequately motivated; all feeling
is thus seen to be excessive, and neither more nor less excessive
than any other, for there is no standard of measurement; any
excess can be canceled by an opposite excess, which is automati-
cally equal, and careful evaluation, as it is impossible, is likewise
unnecessary.

I have stated the matter very baldly, but quite fairly. Any artist
holding Mr. Burke's views, in so far as he is an artist, will be re-
strained more or less by his natural feeling for Tightness of ex-
pression; but as the theory does not, if pushed to its conclusions,
admit the existence of Tightness, the theory encourages shoddy
writing and shoddy living. The hero of Mr. Burke's novel goes
mad, for the reason that, the need of judgment having been re-
moved by his (and Mr. Burke's) theories, the power of judgment
atrophies; yet Mr. Burke continues to preach the doctrine which
brought him to this end.

The perfect embodiment of Mr. Burke's doctrines, whether as
an individual man, or as an allegorical representation of Society,
is that Shan O'Neale who flourished in Ireland in the sixteenth
century, and whose character David Hume has described as fol-
lows in his History of England: "He was a man equally noted for
his pride, his violence, his debaucheries, and his hatred of the
English nation. He is said to have put some of his followers to
death because they endeavored to introduce the use of bread
after the English fashion. Though so violent an enemy to luxury,
he was extremely addicted to riot; and was accustomed, after his
intemperance had thrown him into a fever, to plunge his body
into the mire, that he might allay the flame which he had raised
by former excesses."

74

POETIC CONVENTION

I SHALL ENDEAVOR to define a concept which is fundamental to
any discussion of poetry, and shall employ to indicate the concept
the terms convention and conventional. In popular speech, these
terms are frequently synonymous with banality and banal; in
discussions of literary technique, the term convention frequently
signifies a fixed and generally accepted device for the simplified
representation of some particular kind of truth, as: the pastoral
convention, the convention of the dramatic unities, the conven-
tion of the dramatic chorus. The sense in which I shall use the
term is not unrelated to these, but it is none the less distinct from
them. It is a sense which is perhaps more difficult to grasp, which
also is frequently vaguely implicit in the use of the word for both
of the above meanings.

It should be remembered in connection with this and other
definitions that a critical term ordinarily indicates a quality, and
not an objectively demonstrable entity, yet that every term in
criticism is an abstraction, that is, in a sense, is statistical or quan-
titative in its own nature. This means that no critical term can
possibly be more than a very general indication of the nature of
a perception. Philosophy labors under the same difficulty, since
all generalization is made from perception, or from experience
inextricably involved in perception. There is nothing revolution-
ary about such a statement, but it needs to be kept in mind.
Much of the Socratic hair-splitting of some of the more recent
critics arises from a failure to observe in particular instances that
any critical definition is merely an indication of a unique experi-
ence which cannot be exactly represented by any formula, though

75

it may be roughly mapped out; and it is frequently of greater
importance to discover something of the nature of the experience
than to reduce the more or less expert formula to something
simpler and still less veracious and then to demolish it.

When one speaks of standards of critical judgment, one does
not ordinarily think of weights and measures. One has in mind
certain feelings of Tightness and completeness, which have been
formed in some measure, refined in a large measure, through a
study of the masters. The terms that one will use as a critic will
stand for those feelings. Definitions of such terms can never be
exact beyond misconstruction, but by dint of careful description
and the use of good examples, one may succeed in communicat-
ing standards with reasonable accuracy— to those, at least, to
whom it is important that communication should be made. For
if values cannot be measured, they can be judged; and the bare
existence of both art and criticism shows the persistence of the
conviction that accuracy of judgment is at least ideally possible,
and that the best critics, despite the inevitable margin of differ-
ence, and 'despite their inevitable duller moments, approximate
accuracy fairly closely: by that, I mean that great men tend to
agree with each other, and the fact is worth taking seriously. I
am more or less aware of the extent of the catalogue of disagree-
ments that might be drawn up in reply to such a statement, but
it is far less astounding than, let us say, the unanimity of the best
minds on the subject of Homer and Vergil, particularly if we
accept the doctrine of relativism with any great seriousness.

The two paragraphs foregoing are not to be regarded as a plea
for intellectual amateurism or for any kind of impressionism.
Definition should be as exact as possible, as professional as possi-
ble. It is through the definition of others that we learn of realms
of perception that we have overlooked, and are brought to a posi-
tion in which we may attempt judgment and perhaps arrive at
approbation. But there are limits to language, and the failure to
remember this fact, even though one may grant it readily as a
formal proposition, can lead to nothing save incomprehension on
the part of a reader and obscurantism on the part of a writer.

Keeping these warnings in mind, the reader is now requested

to examine carefully the two poems following. The first is en-
titled Eros1 and is by Robert Bridges; the second 2 has no title,
and is by William Carlos Williams.

Why hast thou nothing in thy face?
Thou idol of the human race,
Thou tyrant of the human heart.
The flower of lovely youth that art;
Yea, and that standest in thy youth
An image of eternal truth,
With thy exuberant flesh so fair,
That only Pheidias might compare,
Ere from his chaste marmoreal form
Time had decayed the colors warm;
Like to his gods in thy proud dress
Thy starry sheen of nakedness.

Surely thy body is thy mind,
For in thy face is nought to find,
Only thy soft unchristened smile,
That shadows neither love nor guile,
But shameless will and power immense,
In secret sensuous innocence.

0 king of joy, what is thy thought?

1 dream thou knowest it is nought.

And wouldst in darkness come, hut thou
Makest the light where'er thou go.
Ah, yet no victim of thy grace,
None who ere longed for thy embrace,
Hath cared to look upon thy face.

1 Shorter Poems, by Robert Bridges. Oxford Press, 1931.
8 Spring and All, by William Carlos Williams, Contact Publishing Company,
Paris, 1923.

77

By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue

mottled clouds driven from the

northeast— a cold wind. Beyond, the

waste of broad muddy fields

brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold familiar wind-
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance— Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken.

A scutiny of these poems will show that most of the poetic
power is concentrated in less than half the number of the lines; in

the first poem, the greatest power is reached in the middle para-
graph, and in the second poem it is reached in the eight lines
beginning Lifeless in appearance. The remaining lines in each
poem vary in power; the chief virtue of many of the lines in each
poem may seem at first glance to reside in the plain conveyance
of necessary information.

And yet the first glance, if it has led to this conclusion, is
illusory. The passages of the greatest power lose much of their
power in isolation : therefore one is justified in saying that some-
thing essentially poetic suffuses the entire structure.

This "something" I shall name the convention of the poem: I
shall use the term convention to indicate the initial assumption
of feeling, or value, to which the poem is laying claim. It is not
equivalent to the term style, though style is necessary to the
establishment and maintenance of convention. Again, convention
is distinct from any set of technical devices, though technical
devices will be employed in the establishment of any convention.
The convention of a poem is not, finally, a part or ingredient of a
poem, for a poem is a unit, and the dissection of it is artificial,
though frequently valuable if one recognize the nature of the
process. Convention is an aspect of poetry that can best be ex-
plained by illustration.

Consider the opening lines of the poem by Williams. The
nervous meter, words like "surge," "mottled," "driven," suggest
an intensity of feeling not justified by the actual perceptions in
the lines. These words are therefore conventional. The content
of the passage is factual to a greater degree than it is perceptual,
and in itself has extremely little interest. In thus describing the
lines, I employ the terms perception and perceptual solely with
reference to the awareness of the author of fine relationships be-
tween facts observed (or perceived directly) and language, or the
medium of judgment and communication. More feeling is as-
sumed, or claimed, by the poet, in a passage such as that under
discussion, than is justified by his language: he claims more than
he is able to communicate, or more, perhaps, than he chooses to
communicate. At first glance a passage of this sort appears a trifle
strained, to use a common but somewhat vague epithet. But in

79

the present poem, the strain is deliberately sought and exactly
rendered. The tempo established in these lines, the whole quality
of the feeling, the information conveyed, are all necessary to, in
fact are a part of, the effect of the eight central lines. With the
line beginning 'lifeless in appearance" the intensity claimed by
the opening is at once justified and increased by the quality of
the perception : the initial assumption prepares one for the exact
increase which occurs, and the preparation is necessary. The feel-
ing of the last two of the eight central lines (Now the grass, etc,)
differs widely from the feeling in the preceding six, but is de-
pendent largely upon the feeling already established in the pre-
ceding six for its existence. The feeling is one of pathos, aroused
by the small and familiar in austere and unfriendly surroundings.
It is related to the feeling of Animula Vagula. The last six lines
of Williams' poem revert to the conventional level, but carry with
them, if read in their context, an echo of the precedent intensity.

My analysis of the poem has been oversimplified for the sake
of momentary convenience. The conventional passages are not
devoid of perceptual value: the skill with which the details of the
landscape are placed in juxtaposition in the opening lines is in
itself an act of perception. The beat, also, in lines nine, ten, and
eleven, taken in conjunction with the material described, has
perceptual value, and one could point out other details. The de-
tails are not of a uniform level of intensity: no two details can
be so. The important thing for the moment is that the intensity
claimed by the passage is on the whole in excess of the justifica-
tion within the passage, and that the intensity assumed is indi-
cated with the greatest of firmness, with the result that departures
from it can be made with equal firmness.

For example, I have said that the beat in lines nine, ten, and
eleven has perceptual value, as indicating the "twiggy" appear-
ance of the landscape. Yet the meaning-content (as distinct from
the sound-content) of every adjective contributing to this percep-
tion is a little vague: "reddish," "purplish," for instance, are by
definition uncertain in their import. But the vagueness is willed
and controlled: one has a definite measure of vagueness set
against the definite intensity of the meter. To make these percep-

80

tions more precise would lessen the impact of the central lines.
This mastery of emphases and of the conventional is one of the
marks, and probably the most important mark, of the great styl-
ist: without this mastery poetry degenerates into slipshod senti-
ment at worst, and at best, as in much of Crane, into brilliant, but
disconnected, epithets and ejaculations.

Conventional language, then, is not in itself stereotyped lan-
guage, though a strongly defined convention may safely carry a
little stereotyped language: in fact stereotyped language may
often be used deliberately to establish a convention. Conventional
language is not dead language, but rather is very subtly living, if
well employed. In so far as any passage is purely conventional,
that is, conventional as distinct from perceptual, it does not repre-
sent a perception of its own content, the feeling it assumes is not
justified within the passage in question. When I speak of conven-
tional language, I shall mean language in which the perceptual
content is slight or negligible. A conventional passage, the adjec-
tive conventional being employed in this sense, is poetic, however,
in so far as it is essential to the entire poetic intention, that is, in
so far as its effects reach forward or backward within the poem.

Let me resume my definitions briefly, that I may add a little
more before proceeding. Poetic convention is the initial, or basic,
assumption of feeling in any poem, from which all departures
acquire their significance. The convention of a poem is present,
or at least discernible as the norm of feeling, throughout the en-
tire poem, so that in a sense all the language of a poem is con-
ventional; but when I use the term conventional language I shall
commonly be speaking of passages in which the perceptual justi-
fication of the feeling is slight. I shall likewise use the term con-
ventional in a generic sense, to indicate a type of convention, as:
the Laforguian convention, the pseudo-referent convention. The
context will ordinarily render my intention perfectly clear.

But I am concerned for the moment with the subject of par-
ticular convention, primarily. The conventional intensity in the
poem by Williams was somewhat in excess of the perceptual value
of many lines in the poem; it would, as I said, appear slightly
strained to many readers. This feeling of strain is not necessarily

81

concomitant with convention; in the poem by Bridges there is no
such strain. The movement of Bridges1 poem is quiet; the lan-
guage, like that of Williams, is plain, but it verges more nearly
on the stereotyped than does the language of Williams in the
poem quoted. The intensity assumed is at a more familiar level of
initial assumption and so appears never to be in excess of the
least important fact conveyed: that is, the convention is nearer
to the matter-of-fact tone of prose than is the convention em-
ployed by Williams. Strangely enough, a convention of such a
type can serve, as on this occasion, with perfect effectiveness in
a poem of the most powerful feeling.

I shall now give a brief account of a few general terms deduci-
ble from these ideas regarding convention :

I. Traditional poetry is poetry which endeavors to utilize the
greatest possible amount of the knowledge and wisdom, both
technical and moral, but technical only in so far as it does not
obstruct the moral, to be found in precedent poetry. It assumes
the ideal Existence of a normal quality of feeling, a normal con-
vention, to which the convention of any particular poem should
more or less conform. Actually, the conformity of any poem,
even though the traditional norm could be exactly defined or
could be found embodied in a single work (Lady Winchilsea's
flawlessly beautiful and eminently traditional poems The Tree
or The Change, or George Herbert's Church Monuments*) ,
would be impossible, since every poem, good or bad, is unique.
But if we cannot lay a finger precisely upon the norm, we can
recognize the more or less normal. If the reader does not follow
me, let me point out that it is easy to recognize the Laforguian
convention in Apollinaire, in the early Eliot, and in Pound's
Mauberly, or the Miltonic convention, even though indifferently
managed, in Thomson and in Wordsworth. The traditional
norm is less obviously discernible, for it embraces a wider variety
of essential qualities, and no one of them receives so marked an
emphasis. One might describe it negatively as that type of poetry
which displays at one and the same time the greatest possible dis-
tinction with the fewest possible characteristics recognizable as
82

the marks of any particular school, period, or man; as, in brief,
that type of poetry which displays the greatest polish of style and
the smallest trace of mannerism. One may describe traditional
poetry positively by saying that it possesses these closely related
qualities: (1) equivalence of motivation and feeling; (2) a form
that permits a wide range of feeling; (3) a conventional norm of
feeling which makes for a minimum of "strain"; (4) a form and
a convention which permit the extraction from every unit of lan-
guage of its maximum content, both of connotation and of deno-
tation; that is, a form and a convention which are in the highest
degree economical, or efficient.

II. Experimental poetry endeavors to widen the racial experi-
ence, or to alter it, or to get away from it, by establishing abnor-
mal conventions. In one sense or another Spenser, Donne, Mil-
ton, Hopkins, Laforgue, and Rimbaud are experimental poets of
a very marked kind. The most striking example in English of a
convention of heightened intensity (that is, of what the unsym-
pathetic might call poetic strain) is to be found in Paradise Lost.
When the poem does not achieve grandeur, it is grandiloquent;
yet the quality of the grandiloquence could have been achieved
only by a master of the highest order, and without it the poem
could hardly have been accomplished. As an act of invention, of
daring experiment, the creation of Miltonic blank verse, both
meter and rhetoric, is not equaled in English poetry; in fact one
is tempted to wonder if it is equaled in any other. The perils
amid which Milton ventured and which he avoided with perfect
equanimity are best estimated by a consideration of his disciples.
Yet in spite of his mastery, the emphatic and violent rhetoric
which he created limits his range, as compared to the range of
Shakespeare, a man of comparable genius but working in a series
of conventions which are relatively traditional. The same rela-
tionship holds between the sonnets of the two men, and is the
more readily discernible, perhaps, because of the smaller form.
Milton is the more complex rhetorician, but the simpler moralist
and a man of far less subtle perception. Milton is the nobler, but
Milton's nobility is in part, and as compared to Shakespeare, the
over-emphasis of imperception.

83

An experimental poet may be traditional in many aspects.
Thus Crashaw, who carries certain experimental qualities of dic-
tion and image found in Donne much farther from the norm
than even Donne ventured, is nevertheless traditional in that he
utilizes by means of discreet suggestion the more emphatic and
experimental metrical forms of the sixteenth century to suggest
complexities of feeling not possible in those metrical forms as the
poets of the sixteenth century used them. He suggests the song-
books in his devotional poetry, as he therein utilizes the common
imagery of the Petrarchan love lyric. Dr. W. C. Williams, an
experimental poet by virtue of his meter, is in other qualities of
his language one of the most richly traditional poets of the past
hundred and fifty years; in fact, making allowances for his some-
what narrow intellectual scope, one would be tempted to com-
pare him, in this respect, to such poets as Hardy and Bridges. No
two experimental conventions will have similar poetic results;
one cannot predicate a great deal that is important of experimen-
tal poetry in general; but, as one might suspect, some Forms of
experimental poetry have had dire results, and of individual
types of convention one can frequently say a great deal.

III. Pseudo-traditional or "literary" poetry is the work of
writers insufficiently aware of what they have stylistically and
morally in common with the best poetry of the race to master this
common element (I am referring, of course, to a common dis-
tinction, skill, and moral intelligence, that which one may find
in Campion, Jonson, and Herrick) and in a manner of speaking
to take it for granted. The literary poet, cut off from his tradi-
tion by education, for he usually occurs in the late eighteenth,
the nineteenth, or the twentieth century, regards the tradition as
something exotic, and employs it accordingly. He imitates the
idioms of the traditional poet, but they are no longer for him fa-
miliar and exact; they are foreign and decorative; they degener-
ate into mannerism. He comes to regard certain words, phrases,
or rhythms, as intrinsically poetic, rather than as instruments of
perception or as the clues to generative ideas. His imitation is
thus crude, as we can see by comparing the pseudo-Elizabethan

meters of Beddoes to the meters of Campion, the meters of Chat-
terton to the meters of the best lyrics of the thirteenth century,
the meters of Swinburne to the meters of Sidney, from which
they are frequently derived.

When, as in the traditional poet, the wisdom and expression
of the past are both a basic part of the individual, when they are
at once taken casually for granted and thoroughly understood,
the individual contribution to the poem can be made with force
and precision. But if the combiner of two elements understands
only one of them, the combination will hardly be satisfactory;
and in this instance it is unlikely that the comprehension of only
one clement is possible: it is both or nothing. A purely literary
poet can very likely never exist; the literary quality rather in-
vades the work in a greater or smaller measure. Swinburne is
one of the best examples I know of a poet of a fairly high order
of talent whose work is pretty evenly corrupted by "literary"
habits. Mr. T. S. Eliot's essay on Swinburne defines the quality
admirably. Symons, Wilde, and Dowson carry farther what Swin-
burne began: their poetry is almost devoid of meaning.

As one approaches a norm, one's variations from that norm
take on more significance. If the convention of a poem is badly
defined, the poetry is vague. This is one of the many things
wrong with most of Shelley, Byron, Hugo, De Musset, Lamar-
tinc, and the other typical romantics. The same weakness inheres
in some measure in Swinburne, though Swinburne's vagueness
is commonly of a more consistent quality.

The "literary," of course, is what commonly appears tradi-
tional to the popular and even the academic taste: Swinburne is
preferred to Landor, and Housman to Bridges. The traditional
is ordinarily thrust aside as merely literary; or else, in such poets
as Crashaw or Williams, it is completely overlooked because the
reader is nonplussed by experimental elements. We have noth-
ing but Arnold's touchstones to guide us in this difficulty, and
our own hard work to make us worthy of guidance; that, and the
Grace of God. It is an obscure procedure, but Landor is surely
greater than Swinburne and Bridges than Housman.

IV. Pseudo-experimental poetry is the work of a poet who con-
fuses tradition with convention, and who, desiring to experi-
ment, sees no way to escape from or alter tradition save by the
abandonment of convention: it means the abandonment of form
and of poetry. Mr. E. E. Cummings is a good example of this
type of poet. When Mr. Cummings ceases to experiment, and
essays the traditional, he becomes painfully literary. Either way
he shows little comprehension of poetry.

To what extent can the principles herein defined be brought
to the defense of the methods employed by the experimental
poets of twentieth century America and of the French Symbolist
School, methods to which I have elsewhere objected? Any an-
swer must be prefaced with the warning that what is true of one
type of convention need not be true of another. What is true
even of one sub-type need not be true of another sub-type of the
same group: consider, for example, the number and variety of
the forms of pseudo-reference.

The convention of heightened intensity is sound procedure in
Williams' poem On the road to the contagious hospital, which I
have discussed at length, because there is poetic justification, a
genuine motivation, for the conventional language, and the con-
ventional language is graduated to the wholly poetic with great
skill and energy. Were there no such justification, however, the
poem would belong, with many of H. D/s poems on Greek land-
scape, in the class of implicit reference to a non-existent symbolic
value. Much of Wordsworth's more or less Miltonic grandilo-
quence belongs in the same class: the grandeur never emerges or
emerges too seldom. Bryant is sometimes similar, when he applies
a tone of moral grandeur to material that is purely physical and
unable to support such a tone.

The pseudo-reference of T. S. Eliot's Gerontion) partly a mat-
ter of reference to non-existent plots, partly a matter of purely
grammatical logic, seems in some ways to resemble the height-
ened intensity employed by Dr. Williams in On the road to the
contagious hospital. That is, while Dr. Williams, in certain pas-
sages, assumes more feeling than he perceives, Mr. Eliot, in cer-

86

tain passages, assumes more reasonableness than he perceives.
Dr. Williams works up to passages in which his claims are sup-
ported by perception; so does Mr. Eliot; and in each poem these
passages represent the core of the poem, not only as regards feel-
ing, but as regards rational theme. The climax of Mr. Eliot's
poem, the passage beginning: "I that was near your heart was
removed therefrom," justly one of the most famous passages in
recent poetry, is probably greater than anything in the poem by
Dr. Williams, though perhaps not so much greater as Mr. Eliot's
admirers (who commonly fail to understand Dr. Williams alto-
gether) might be ready to believe.

On the other hand, Dr. Williams' poem is far more solidly
written. The fine passages in Gerontion, though frequently of a
magnificent precision in themselves, arise from a mass of care-
fully veiled imprecisions, which, on first glance, appear to have
more meaning than they really have. The success of conven-
tional language of this kind depends very largely on the reader's
being more or less deluded: the procedure in Dr. Williams' poem
is at once more in the open and more definite, and one knows
what is happening at every instant. There are moments in Mr.
Eliot's poem at which no one can be really sure of what is going
on, and as a result one feels, or I cannot escape feeling, a degree
of uncertainty in the very essence of the poem. One has again,
perhaps, the fallacy of imitative form: the attempt to express a
state of uncertainty by uncertainty of expression; whereas the
sound procedure would be to make a lucid and controlled state-
ment regarding the condition of uncertainty, a procedure, how-
ever, which would require that the poet understand the nature
of uncertainty, not that he be uncertain. Gerontion, at any rate,
is the most skillful modern poem in English to employ any large
measure of pseudo-reference; the superiority of its pseudo-refer-
ence to most of that of Crane and of Yeats probably derives from
the fact that it is deliberate, whereas theirs is commonly in a
large part unintentional— in Gerontion it is mystification instead
of confusion, or at least is employed willfully and deliberately as
a means of bringing certain recognized, and, for the author, irre-
ducible confusion, under a little control.

To cite another example of pseudo-reference, Hart Crane's
poem The Dance reverses the order of conventional and poetic
language employed by Williams. That is, Williams' language is
largely conventional in the early part of the poem, and then takes
on poetic fullness at the climax. Crane's poem, on the other
hand, displays most of its fully poetic content (the purely but
brilliantly descriptive writing) scattered through the first half,
approximately, of the poem, and then breaks into a complete dis-
junction of feeling and meaning at the climax.

The purely grammatical logic of much of Faustus and Helen,
parts I and III, might be in a measure defensible on the same
grounds as the pseudo-reference of Gerontion, or to the same ex-
tent, except that there is a much greater proportion of pseudo-
reference in the poem by Crane and that there is much less clar-
ity as to the general theme, so that the moments of coherence arc
never sufficient to give any perceptible support to the conglom-
eration of conventional language.

But we may probably say for any kind of pseudo-reference
that it goes through the forms of reasonable statement and hence
may be a preparation for reasonable statement, or a stop-gap be-
tween passages of reasonable statement, and that, if it does not
occur in great excess and is distributed in small enough bits, if,
in short, it is not too obtrusive and is not too seriously involved
in the very conception of the poem, it may do relatively little
harm and so be accepted at times as an apparently inevitable evil.

Laforguian irony, however, is not a preparation for anything
else, is not an unfulfilled form, but is merely a slipshod attitude,
final in itself, and invariably a vice of feeling. Qualitative pro-
gression, likewise, is not a preparation for anything else; it offers
no unfulfilled claims or half-utilized machinery. If it is central to
the structure of the work— that is, if the theme is really unformu-
lable and merely a mood— it is a vice for the reasons which I have
given elsewhere. It is legitimate only when used occasionally and
in an impure way, as Mr. Burke has shown it in use on the pe-
riphery of Hamlet.

We may say in general, then, that some kinds of experimental
convention are more dangerous than others, and the more recent

types appear to be the most dangerous, perhaps because they have
been used more boldly— or rather, more rashly— than experi-
mental conventions have ever been used before. Secondly and
finally, traditional poetry is the most economically and firmly
constructed variety possible. To see this, one has only to compare
Bridges' The southwind strengthens to a gale to Gerontion or to
The Dance.

PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE

THE DICHOTOMY of major and minor poetry is obviously unsatis-
factory, nor is the reason for this the one so often given, that gen-
eral descriptive terms have no meaning. They can at least be
given meaning. If Ben Jonson is a major poet and Campion a
minor poet, it is patently outrageous to apply either epithet to
Byron; yet Byron for the present has a place in our literature,
and, though it seems incredible that he should be read as long as
Jonson or as Campion, it is probable that he will be read for a
long time. Of Jonson and Campion we may say that both are
masters; few men have lived to write as well; it is unlikely that
many men have lived to appreciate them fully. Their difference
is mainly a difference of scope; the achievement of Campion can-
not be dimmed by comparison with the achievement of the great-
est poets, for within its scope it is unimpeachable. The achieve-
ment of Byron, on the other hand, suffers by comparison with
the work of any of the minor masters, even with that of Googe or
Turberville; in a superficial sense he attempted as much as did
Jonson, but he understood with precision nothing that he
touched, and his art he understood least of all.

The more important poets might be placed in four groups : the
second-rate, those whose gift for language is inadequate to their
task, poets such as Byron, D. H. Lawrence, or Poe, and regard-
less of their other virtues or failings; the major, those who possess
all of the virtues, both of form and of range; the primitive, those
who utilize all of the means necessary to the most vigorous form,
but whose range of material is limited; and the decadent, those
who display a fine sensitivity to language and who may have a
90

very wide scope, but whose work is incomplete formally (in the
manner of the pseudo-referent and qualitative poets) or is some-
what but not too seriously weakened by a vice of feeling (in the
manner of the better post-romantic ironists). The second type
of decadent poets may differ from the second-rate only in degree
of weakness. In this essay I shall endeavor to discover some of the
implications of the terms decadent and primitive as used in this
way. The nature of major poetry and of the second-rate should
be reasonably obvious, even though there might be disagreement
over examples.

It will be seen that most experimental poetry, particularly ex-
perimental poetry of the types developed in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, appears to issue either in primi-
tivism or in decadence, if it issues in nothing worse. The term
primitivism, however, may be allowed to include traditional
minor poetry as well.

If we compare The Dance, by Hart Crane, to one of the better
poems of Jonson or of George Herbert, it is decadent in the sense
in which I have just defined the term: it is incomplete poetry.
Historically, however, Crane's poetry is related not only to Jon-
son, but to the romantics, especially to Whitman, much of whose
doctrine Crane adopts. Whitman's doctrine is illusory: like all of
the anti-rational doctrines of the past two centuries, it vanishes if
pursued by definition. Whitman, as a second-rate poet, however,
was equipped to write of it, after a fashion, without rendering its
nature immediately evident. His poetic language was as vague as
his expository; he had no capacity for any feeling save of the
cloudiest and most general kind. Crane's poetic gift is finer than
Whitman's, and the precision of his language forces one to recog-
nize the inadequacy of his reference. If he is decadent in com-
parison to Jonson, he yet marks an advance in relationship to
Whitman. It would probably be easier to convince most readers
at present that something is wrong with Crane than that some-
thing is wrong with Whitman. The reason for this is simple: one
observes rather quickly that something is wrong with Crane, be-
cause something is right, and one is thus able to get one's bear-
ings. From one point of view his language is frequently that of a

9'

master. Nowhere in Whitman can one find such splendor or
even such precision of language as in The Dance or as in The
River. And if one proceeds from these to his most finished per-
formances, Repose of Rivers? Faustus and Helen II, and Voyages
II, one has poems in which the trace of decadence is scarcely dis-
cernible.1 It would not have been impossible, then, for Crane to
decrease the amount of pseudo-reference in his poems; as a deca-
dent poet, he was not bound to deteriorate; nor does his poetry
indicate that contemporary literature is in a state of deterioration.
Mr. Pound's Cantos are decadent in relation to Paradise Lost,
since their structure is purely qualitative. But, historically, there
is probably another relationship to Whitman here, in which Mr.
Pound shows not decay but growth. It is not a relationship of

1 Of Repose of Rivers one may say that the individual images are miraculous,
but that their order is not invariably necessary; this fact, combined with the
lack of rhythmical conviction as the poet proceeds from one image to the next,
results in a frail, almost tentative structure. Faiistus and Helen II is purely
descriptive and hence offers no temptations to sin; the fantastic subject matter,
combined with the relative safety of the approach, enabled Crane to utilize his
entire talent%'for rhetorical ingenuity without risk of its betraying him. In
Voyages II, which seems to me his greatest poem, 'he disciplined this talent to
meet a more dangerous and exacting theme, and achieved greater solidity than
in Repose of Rivers.

It will be observed that my selections do not coincide with those of Mr.
Allen Tate. Mr. Tate speaks of The River as Crane's "most complex and sus-
tained performance, a masterpiece of aesthetic form," and of Praise for an Urn
as "the finest elegy in American poetry" (Hound and Horn: Summer, 1932).
This seems to me sheer nonsense. The latter poem is metrically a very stiff and
inexpert free verse; except for the two striking lines about the clock and half a
dozen other passable lines, it is sentimental and affected. "The slant moon on
the slanting hill," "Delicate riders of the storm," "The everlasting eyes of
Pierrot/ and of Gargantua the laughter," are sentimental cliches of the twenties,
and their quality pervades the whole poem. As to The River, it is as ineptly put
together as any romantic poem I have read: the poem should begin with the
passage about the cannery works, and everything previous should be discarded;
about half the lines from the cannery works to the Pullman breakfasters should
be revised, the eyeless fish, the old gods of the rain, and much of the rest of it
being the shoddiest of decoration, not even skillful charlatanry; and in the last
part of the poem, which is the finest and which is very powerful, there are still
bad lines, tor examples, "Throb past the city storied of three thrones," "All
fades but one thin skyline 'round. . . . Ahead," and the two final lines of the
poem: The defects of The River are not due to the theme, but merely to care-
• lessness, and could easily have been revised away. The pantheism which wrecks
The Dance appears in The River in a fairly harmless form, and merely lends
pathos to certain lines, particularly to those describing the end of Dan Midland.

92

theme, as in Crane's poetry, but one of form. Mr. Pound's long
line is in part a refinement of Whitman's line; his progression
from image to image resembles Whitman's in everything save
Whitman's lack of skill. The Cantos are structurally Whitma-
nian songs, dealing with non-Whitmanian matter, and displaying
at their best great suavity and beauty. As Crane shifts out of
pseudo-reference into rational reference in Voyages II, so Mr.
Pound in his versions of Propertius, using the same form as in
the Cantos, produces coherent comment on formulable themes,
or does so part of the time. The change may be due to the genius
of Propertius, but it is possible in Mr. Pound's form. The form,
however, would not permit of any very rapid or compact reason-
ing.

I have elsewhere suggested that post-romantic irony represents
an advance over the uncritical emotionalism of such poets as
Hugo or Shelley, in so far as it represents the first step in a diag-
nosis.

The primitive poet is the major poet on a smaller scale. The
decadent poet is the major, or primitive, poet with some impor-
tant faculty absent from the texture of all his work. Dr. Williams
is a good example of the type of poet whom I should call the
contemporary primitive. His best poems display no trace of the
formal inadequacies which I have mentioned as the signs of
decadence. Such poems as The Widow's Lament or To Waken
an Old Lady are fully realized; the form is complete and perfect;
the feeling is sound. Dr. Williams has a surer feeling for lan-
guage than any other poet of his generation, save, perhaps,
Stevens at his best. But he is wholly incapable of coherent
thought and he had not the good fortune to receive a coherent
system as his birthright. His expository writing is largely incom-
prehensible; his novel, A Voyage to Pagany, displays an almost
ludicrous inability to motivate a long narrative. His experience
is disconnected and fragmentary, but sometimes a fragment is
wrought to great beauty. His widest range has been reached in a
single piece of prose, The Destruction of Tenochtitlan, in which
he found his material more or less ready for treatment in the

93

form of history: in treating it, he achieved one of the few great
prose styles of our time.2

Dr. Williams bears a certain resemblance to the best lyric poets
of the thirteenth century: there is in both an extreme sophistica-
tion of style, a naive limitation of theme (Dr. Williams has a
wider range than the early poets, however) and a fresh enthusi-
asm for the theme. It was out of such poetry as Alisoun that
English poetry little by little grew. Sidney represents a resurgence
of the same quality at a later date, but touched with Petrarchan
decadence.3 Decadent poetry, as I have defined it, would have
been impossible in thirteenth century England: it requires a ma-
ture poetry as a background.

A decadent poet such as Crane may, as I have said, if consid-
ered historically, represent a gain and not a loss. As a matter of
fact, he may embody the most economical method of recovery
for an old and rich tradition in a state of collapse, for he offers
all of the machinery of a mature and complicated poetry. Both
decadent and primitive lack an understanding and correlation of
their experience: the primitive accepts his limitations through
wisdom or ignorance; the decadent endeavors to conceal them,
or, like some primitives, may never discover them; the primitive,
however, treats of what he understands and the decadent of more
than he understands. For either to achieve major poetry there is
necessary an intellectual clarification of some kind. But to attain
major poetry from the position of a primitive poet such as Dr.
Williams might necessitate the creation of a good deal of techni-
cal machinery as well; whereas the pseudo-referent poet has most
of his machinery made and already partly in action.

* In connection with the fragmentariness, the primitivism, of this piece, it is
worth noting that the rhetoric, perhaps merely because of the perfection to
which it raises traditional heroic prose, resembles closely that or Macaulay's
History, the passage in Macaulay describing the formation and character of
Cromwell's army, offering especially striking similarity. Macaulay chose to write
a five volume work, one of the supreme English masterpieces, in this style. Dr.
Williams happened to write a twelve-page masterpiece in the style, or so one is
forced to conclude from the quality of most of his prose.

'In connection with this statement and others regarding the lyrics of the
sixteenth century, see my review of the Oxford Book of 16th Century Verse,
edited by E. K. Chambers, in the Hound and Horn, Volume VI, Number 4.

94

There is probably the same relationship between the Pe-
trarchan rhetoric of the sixteenth century, with its decorative and
more or less pseudo-referent conceit, and the best Metaphysical
verse of the seventeenth century. In Shakespeare's sonnets the
rhetoric is Petrarchan, yet the Petrarchan conceit is given a
weight of meaning new to it; something similar occurs in the
poetry of Fulke Greville. The gap between the sonnets of Shake-
speare and the sonnets of Donne is not extremely great. Yet the
best thirteenth century lyrics, like the best early Tudor lyrics,
those by such men as Vaux, Googe, Gascoigne, and Turberville,
are better poetry than the work of Daniel or of Dray ton, in spite
of the fact that they would have been less immediately useful in
certain ways to Donne. So with our contemporaries: Dr. Williams
is more consistently excellent than Crane, and at his best is pos-
sibly better. Crane's machinery, convenient as it might at any
moment prove, remains, so long as it is not utilized, a source of
confusion.

The decadent poetry of Mr. Pound does not appear to me to
provide so many opportunities for filling out as does that of
Crane, partly because of the meter, which presents a problem too
elaborate in itself for discussion here, and partly because all, or
nearly all, superfluous machinery in the way of pseudo-referent
forms has been avoided. That is, the difficulty of extending the
usefulness of a convention may often bear a direct relationship to
the perfection with which the convention accomplishes the aims
for which it was created.

A perfect primitive poet is not of necessity better than a deca-
dent poet, though he may be; in fact a decadent poet may seem of
greater value than a poet whom one might call major. Some
major poets are greater than others, and a poem by Mr. Stevens,
technically decadent because tinged with his vice— Of the Man-
ner of Addressing Clouds, for example— may suffer extremely
little from its decadence and be in other respects a poem of tre-
mendous power.

The poetry of Mr. Paul Val6ry demonstrates that decadence
may be a very economical mode of recovery. Mr. Val6ry was

95

formed in the influence of the Symbolists, poets decadent, fre-
quently, in the same way as the Americans of the second and
third decades of the twentieth century. The poet who illustrates
this point more clearly than any other in English is Mr. T. Sturge
Moore, who shares in a considerable measure the background of
Mr. Val<§ry.

Mr. J. V. Cunningham, in the Commonweal for July 27, 1932,
describes Mr. Moore's favorite theme as that "spiritual pride
which would overreach natural limits ... the effort to violate
human relationships by imposing one's identity on others," to-
gether with criticism of such spiritual pride. Mr. Cunningham
cites the excellent poem On Four Poplars as an instance of the
subject matter, and other poems could be cited. The theme, how-
ever, is not limited to the ethical sphere in Mr. Moore, but has
its religious counterpart, in a mysticism related to that of poets so
diverse as Hart Crane and Robinson Jeffers, which leads to the
attempt to violate our relationship with God, or with whatever
myth we put in his place, even with Nothingness, and which
leads concurrently to the minimizing of moral distinctions, that
is, of the careful perception of strictly human experience. Mr.
Moore differs from the Romantic mystics in defining this tempta-
tion without succumbing; in defining not only the temptation
but its legitimate uses, and its dangers. His repeated poems on
the subject of Silence, and his repeated references to Semele, are
among the more obvious indications of his interest in the subject.
His great lyric To Silence may be taken as an allegorical sum-
mary of this theme and of his own relationship to romantic tradi-
tion, the tradition of rejuvenation through immersion in pure
feeling, or sensation, the immersion which is the mystical com-
munion of the romantic, and which occurs in its most perfect
literary examples among the devotees of imitative form to be
found in the French Symbolist and American Experimental
schools.

Mr, Moore's immersion has actually led to rejuvenation, to an
inexhaustibly fascinating freshness of perception : the immersion
of other poets has too often led to disintegration. I quote the
entire text of the poem To Silence:

O deep and clear as is the sky,

A soul is as a bird in thee

That travels on and on; so I,

Like a snared linnet> now break free,

Who sought thee once with leisured grace

As hale youth seeks the sea's warm bays.

And as a floating nereid sleeps

In the deep-billowed ocean-stream;

And by some goat-herd on lone rock

Is thought a corpse, though she may dream

And profit by both health and ease

Nursed on those high green rolling seas,—

Long once 1 drifted in thy tide,

Appearing dead to those I passed;

Yet lived in thee, and dreamed, and waked

Twice what I had been. Now, I cast

Me broken on thy buoyant deep

And dreamless in thy calm would sleep.

Silence, 1 almost now believe
Thou art the speech on lips divine,
Their greatest kindness to their child.
Yet 1, who for all wisdom pine.
Seek thee but as a bather swims
To refresh and not dissolve his limbs:—

Though these be thine, who asked and had,
And asked and had again, again,
Yet always found they wanted more
Till craving grew to be a pain;
And they at last to silence fled,
Glad to lose all for which they pled.

O pure and wide as is the sky
Heal me, yet give me back to life/

97

Though thou foresee the day when I,
Sated with failure, dead to strife,
Shall seek in thee my beings end,
Still be to my fond hope a friend.

The structure of the poem is logical and the reference is exact,
but the feeling is very strange. There is a remarkable freshness of
sensitivity, yet it is a different freshness from that of a primitive,
such as Dr. Williams. It might almost be characterized as the
hypersensitivity of convalescence: the poet is minutely sensitive
to dangers and meanings past but imminent, to which Dr. Wil-
liams is not only insensitive but of the very existence of which he
is unaware.

If we can imagine that human experience is portrayable geo-
metrically as a continuous circle on which there are equally
spaced points, A, C, E, and G, and that classical poetry has been
written with these as its chief points of reference, we can then
imagine a breakdown, a period of confusion, in which these
points are lost, but after which a new set of points, B, D, F, and
H, also spaced equally but not the same points, are established.
These new points would give a comparable balance, or intelli-
gence, perhaps, but an altered view of the detail, that is, an
altered quality of perception, of feeling. Or it might be that the
old points would merely be regained after the breakdown, the
quality of the perception being then affected by the past experi-
ence of the breakdown.

It is as if we extended the allegory of the poem just quoted,
thus: Silence is equal to pure quality, unclassified sensation (a
purely hypothetical infinity, which, however, we can approach
indefinitely),4 and the immersion in sensation (or confusion)

*Cf. Morris Cohen, Reason and Nature, page 37: "Avenarius wishes to
purify our world-view by returning to the natural view of experience as it
existed before it was vitiated by the sophistications of thought On the form of
introjection). But the empiricist's uncritical use of the category of the given,
and the nominalistic dogma that relations are created rather than discovered by
thought, lead Avenarius to banish not only animism and other myths, but also
the categories, substance, causality, etc., as inventions of the mind. In doing
this he runs afoul of the great insight of Kant that without concepts or cate-
gories percepts are blind." Also Allen Tate, The Fallacy of Humanism, in The

amounts to the dissolution of one's previous standards in order
to obtain a fresh sensibility. This is what the romantic movement
amounted to, the degree of dissolution varying with each poet,
regardless of whether the dissolution was necessary. Mr. Moore
states explicitly, however, in this poem and in others, not only
the value of the immersion, but its peril, and the need of the
return. This does not mean that Mr. Moore at any point in his
career has performed experiments like those of Rimbaud or of
Joyce; he has not done so publicly, and there is no reason to sup-
pose that he has done so privately. But his sensibility was pro-
foundly affected by those who did perform them; he is a part of
the tradition that had at an earlier point in its history subjected
itself to the immersion; his private history as a poet begins at the
point in the history of the tradition at which recovery has begun,
and his talents enable him to bring that recovery to its highest
pitch of development; but he remembers and understands what
preceded him, and his sensibility bears witness to the fact. He
thus resembles Paul Val^ry, though of the two poets his relation-
ship to the Symbolist tradition is perhaps the more obvious. The
feeling of strangeness and freshness is still upon Mr. Moore's
poetry, as upon one who has just emerged from the sea. One
should examine in particular the following poems: To Silence,
To Slow Music, From Titian s Bacchanal, the first half of the
double sonnet Silence, Love's First Communion, An Aged
Beauty's Prayer, The Deeper Desire, the sonnets on Sappho,
Semele, lo, Suggested by the Representation on a Grecian Am-
phora, The Song of Chiron, Tragic Fates, To a Child Listening
to a Repeater, and, among his longer works, Daimonassa (per-
haps his greatest single achievement), Mariamne, The Sea Is
Kind, The Centaurs Booty, and The Rout of the Amazons.

The term decadence is frequently used to denote or connote
personal immorality, yet even in this sense the historical defense
is sometimes effective. There is no doubt that Verlaine was per-

Critique of Humanism (Brewer and Warren: 1930): "Pure Quality is nature
itself because it is the source of experience. . . . Pure Quality would be pure
evil, and it is only through the means of our recovery from a lasting immersion
in it ... that any man survives the present hour; Pure Quality is pure dis-
integration,"

99

sonally childish, sentimental, and debauched. He was in some
ways one of the most muddled souls of a muddled century: his
life was pseudo-referent even though his poetry was frequently
not, and, like his poetry, was too often governed wholly by mood.
He was not, as Baudelaire was, morally intelligent among what-
ever sins he may have committed, and was never much the wiser
for his sins or wrote better poetry because of them. The greater
part of his life was simply confusion; yet a narrow margin of it
he evaluated with precision; to that extent he was superior to
such formless predecessors as Lamartine or de Musset, who
smeared everything with a consistent texture of falsity. As a poet,
Verlaine at his best was rather a primitive than a decadent,
for his poetry is not ambitious; his best art was as natural and
proper, if we consider his situation in time and space, and poten-
tially as valuable to his successors, as was the art of the author of
Alisoun.

1 do not mean that Verlaine's limitations were inevitable, how-
ever. In offering an historical excuse for decadence, formal or
personal, I dp not mean to imply that there is ever an historical
necessity for either, but merely that life is painful if one expects
more than two or three men in a century to behave as rational
animals, and that for a good many men there are mitigating cir-
cumstances. Baudelaire ran through romanticism early in his
career, to achieve the most remarkable balance of powers in
French literature after Racine; he had no need of several genera-
tions of graduated decadence; his recovery was accomplished at
a bound. He was determined by his period only to this extent:
that he dealt with the problem of evil in the terms in which he
had met it, the terms of the romantic view of life; and it was
because of these terms that he was able to embody the universal
principles of evil in the experience of his own age and evaluate
that experience.

Our own position may be similar. If we doubt the value of the
romantic communion, if we cannot see that the poet who has
survived it is a better poet for it, we may at least say this: that
the communion, as we have experienced it historically, if not per-
sonally, has extended our knowledge of evil and so made us
100

wiser; for the moral intelligence is merely the knowledge and
evaluation of evil; and the moral intelligence is the measure of
the man and of the poet alike. It may seem a hard thing to say of
that troubled and magnificent spirit, Hart Crane, that we shall
remember him chiefly for his having shown us a new mode of
damnation, yet it is for this that we remember Orestes, and
Crane has in addition the glory of being, if not his own /Eschy-
lus, perhaps, in some fragmentary manner, his own Euripides.
Again, we should remember that there is no certitude that
several generations of graduated decadence will lead to recovery;
they may lead merely to a general condition of hypochondria.
Crane's first book was better than his second, and the work of his
last few years displays utter collapse. T. S. Eliot abandoned La-
forguian irony not to correct his feelings, but to remain satisfied
with them: his career since has been largely a career of what one
might call psychic impressionism, a formless curiosity concerning
queer feelings which are related to odds and ends of more or less
profound thought. There is current at present a very general
opinion that it is impossible in our time to write good poetry in
the mode, let us say, of Bridges, either because of the kind of
poetry that has been written since ("the stylistic advances of
Eliot and of Pound"), or because of social conditions ("the chaos
of modern thought"), or because of both, or because of something
else. I believe this to be a form of group hypochondria. The sim-
ple fact of the matter is, that it is harder to imitate Bridges than
to imitate Pound or Eliot, as it is harder to appreciate him, be-
cause Bridges is a finer poet and a saner man; he knows more
than they, and to meet him on his own ground we must know
more than to meet them.

Many experimental poets, by limiting themselves to an abnor-
mal convention, limit themselves in range or in approach: that is,
become primitives or decadents of necessity; and they lack the
energy or ability to break free of the elaborate and mechanical
habits which they have, in perfecting, imposed upon themselves.
Miss Moore, Dr, Williams, Gerard Hopkins, and Ezra Pound
might all serve as examples. In other words, the selection of a
convention is a very serious matter; and the poet who sets out to

101

widen his tradition may often succeed only in narrowing or
sterilizing himself. Crashaw's experimenting at its wildest gets
wholly out of hand and becomes pseudo-referent decadence.
Nevertheless, the experimenting of Donne and of Crashaw is
subject to the check of a comprehensible philosophy, as the ex-
perimentalism of Pound and of Crane is not. The experimental-
ism of Milton was subject to such a check and was, I think one
may say, necessitated by the unprecedented scope of his plan and
by the unprecedented violence and magnificence of his mind, but
this is not to say that he was the greatest of poets, though he was,
of course, one of the greatest.

The relationship between experimentalism, decadence, and
primitivism is thus seen to be intimate, though it would be rash
to formulate many laws of the relationship.

Decadent poetry may be valuable as a point of departure, either
to its authors or to others, exactly in so far as its deficiencies are
recognized and are susceptible of correction. Not all types of
decadent poetry need be equally valuable in this respect, though
the understanding of one may equal in value the understanding
of another as a form of moral knowledge. Unless the deficiencies
of a decadent convention are recognized, there is little likelihood
that the convention will be improved; there is great likelihood
that it will deteriorate; for it is the nature of man to deteriorate
unless he recognizes the tendency and the source of the deterio-
ration and expends actual effort to reduce them.

102

THE INFLUENCE OF METER ON
POETIC CONVENTION

Section I: FOREWORD

I HAVE ENDEAVORED to show in other essays that the morality of
poetry is inextricably involved in its form, and in a particular
essay that it is closely related to the convention, or norm of feel-
ing, of any particular poem, and to certain general types of con-
vention. As the norm of a poem will set certain limits upon the
range and procedure and quality of feeling possible within the
poem, we may say that a convention, whether we take the term
in the particular or in the generic sense, has a life of its own to
which the poet is largely subjected once he has adopted it. I have
tried to indicate, in discussing the idea of convention, that meter
plays an important part in the establishment of convention. I shall
now endeavor to draw certain general conclusions regarding the
poetic effectiveness of a few basic types of meter.

This essay will be divided into five sections, as follows:

The first section comprises the present descriptive foreword.

The second section contains a brief sketch of the theory of
traditional English meter on which my scansion of experimental
meter and my theories regarding the relationship of meter to
poetic convention are based.

The third section is a study of the scansion of free verse and of
the influence of free verse rhythms upon poetic convention. I
have begun this analysis with specimens of my own free verse be-
cause I can speak of my own intentions with a certain amount of
authority. I have proceeded thence to the poets from whose
practice I derived my own. I am not sure, however, that my own

poems offer the clearest illustrations available with which to in-
troduce the medium to the reader unfamiliar with its principles.
The deliberate effort which I made in most of these poems to
introduce a substructure, iambic as to beat, but not pentameter,
as a kind of counterpoint to the free-verse beat, probably renders
much of my free-verse too difficult for the beginner to scan and
may even ruin much of it entirely. The specimens from Dr. Wil-
liams, H. D., and Mr. Wallace Stevens, however, though they
possess great finish and variety of movement, probably keep the
metrical norm a little more obviously in view. If the reader finds
the meter of my own poems obscure, therefore, he may fairly
reserve his incredulity regarding the system of scansion until
after he shall have studied the specimens of scansion from the
other writers.

Even so, I have little hope that many readers will understand
the scansion that I propose for free verse, chiefly because an un-
derstanding of it requires a very thorough knowledge of all the
best poems employing the medium in the second and third dec-
ades of our century, a sensitive and conscientious study of several
years in duration, the immersion of the student in a particular
way of feeling, the acquisition of a new and difficult set of habits
of hearing and of audible reading. This discipline is arduous and
on the face of it is not particularly tempting: there are so many
other things that one can do instead. In the few years past, the
discipline has been almost wholly abandoned save by the few
poets of the Experimental Generation1 whose sensibilities were

1For the sake of a few loose but usable terms, I offer the following classi-
fication of 20th century poetry in English: I. The Generation of Forerunners:
Hardy, Bridges, Yeats, T. Sturge Moore, and Alice Meynell; II. The Genera-
tion of Transition: Robinson, Frost, and Agnes Lee; III. The Experimental
Generation: Stevens, Williams, Miss Moore, Miss Loy, Joyce (whose prose is
related in important ways to the verse of his contemporaries), Adelaide Crapsey,
Pound, Eliot, H. D., and Lawrence; IV. The Reactionary Generation: Crane
(a member of this group, instead of the last, solely by virtue of his dates, per-
sonal affiliations, and inability to write or understand free verse), Tate, Balcer,
Blackmur, Clayton Stafford, Louise Bogan, Grant Code, J. V. Cunningham,
Don Stanford, Barbara Gibbs. Mr. J. C. Ranson is a kind of ambiguous and un-
happy though sometimes distinguished connective between this group and the
last. The direction and significance of this group are clearest in Howard
Baker, in a little of Tate, and in the writing, very small in bulk at present, of
Stafford, Stanford, Cunningham, and perhaps Miss Gibbs. Such a classifica-

104

largely formed in this discipline. The most distinguished poets
of the Reactionary Generation1 who have attempted free verse-
Hart Crane and Louise Bogan, for example— have been wholly
unsuccessful in their brief and rare excursions into the medium.
The Experimental poets who mastered the medium, it is worth
observing, were those who for some years were more or less
fanatical on the subject and gave themselves over to it wholly or
almost wholly: Wallace Stevens is perhaps the only poet living
who has practiced the new and the old meters simultaneously
and at a high level of excellence. Very few readers, even profes-
sionally literary and academic readers, will give the subject the
attention necessary for even a preliminary perception of it, but I
am certain of the soundness of my scansion and wish to set it on
record, for it will be of value to students here and there as time
goes on.

For the present, suffice it to say that my objections to free verse
do not depend upon the scansion of free verse, whether the verse
be mine or that of any other; the objections are more cogent if
the verse cannot be scanned. My system of scansion is offered by
way of a preliminary defense of the medium, to show what it
really has accomplished, and to limit as far as possible my objec-
tions, which, in my opinion, have only a narrow, though a quite
definite, margin of relevancy. The objections are closely related
to objections which I have made elsewhere to the other aspects of
the recent experimental conventions.

The fourth section will deal with the relationship of experi-
mental to traditional meters, the examples being drawn mainly
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and will endeavor
to show that the relationships are more fruitful of good within
the old framework of accentual-syllabic meters than within, or in
connection with, the framework of free verse.

The fifth section will give a brief summary of the history and
principles of the heroic couplet, and of its effect upon poetic con-
vention in the past, and a brief comparison of the powers of the

tion omits good poets here and there: de la Mare and Viola Meynell cannot
quite be included; the most important omission is Elizabeth Daryush, the finest
British poet since T. Sturge Moore.

105

heroic couplet Cone of the most thoroughly traditional of all
forms) with the powers of the forms that have been used in re-
cent years to take something resembling its place: Websterian
verse, the long free-verse line, stemming from Whitman and
brought to its greatest perfection by Pound and by Miss Moore,
and the syllabic meters of Robert Bridges.

Although this essay does not cover every known form of meter,
it should be kept in mind that it does cover the following fields:
the chief types of modern experimental meter in their relation-
ship to convention (that is, the common varieties of lyrical free
verse, and of semi-didactic free verse, Websterian verse, and the
accentual and syllabic systems of Hopkins and of Bridges), the
principles of traditional meter in its relationship to convention,
and the principles of the relationships between traditional and
experimental meters. That, as nearly as I can discover, is the
entire bearing of the subject of meter on my present studies.

Section II: GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF METER

THE POETIC? LINE, as I understand the subject, has at one time or
another been constructed according to four different systems of
measurement: the quantitative, or classical system, according to
which a given type of line has a given number of feet, the feet
being of certain recognized types and being constructed on the
basis of the lengths of the component syllables; the accentual, or
Anglo-Saxon, system, according to which the line possesses a
certain number of accents, the remainder of the line not being
measured, a system of which free verse is a recent and especially
complex subdivision; the syllabic, or French, system, according to
which a line is measured solely by the number of syllables which
it contains; and the accentual-syllabic, or English, system, which
in reality is identical with the classical system in its most general
principles, except that accented and unaccented syllables displace
long and short as the basis of constructing the foot, and that
pyrrhic and spondaic feet seldom occur and might in fact be re-
garded as ideally impossible because of the way in which accent
is determined, a matter which I shall presently discuss.
1 06

Mechanically perfect meter, were it possible, would be lifeless;
meter of which the variation is purely accidental is, like all other
manifestations of pure accident, awkward and without character.
There are in English accentual-syllabic meter the following prin-
ciples of variation, if no others:

(1) Substitution: That is, an inverted or trisyllabic or other
foot may be substituted for an iambic foot in an iambic line,
or similar alterations may be introduced into other lines. The
method of substitution varies with writers and with periods. In
the blank verse of Ben Jonson, there is a taut regularity, the result
of the very careful manipulation of iambic and trochaic feet; and
then occasionally there occurs a trisyllabic substitution, which
effects a nervous leap, as suddenly stilled as it was undertaken :

Thou vermin, have I taen thee out of dung,
So poor, so wretched, when no living thing
Would keep thee company hut a spider or worse?

The device of trisyllabic and even of quatrosyllabic substitu-
tion is practiced by Webster to such an extent that the verse
norm almost disappears, and certain passages are interpreted by
some editors as prose and by others as verse, with about an equal
show of reason. Milton, on the other hand, is extremely cautious
in the use of trisyllabic feet— his extra syllables are all but lost in
elision— but he goes very far in the use of trochaic feet and of
trochaic words in iambic feet. To illustrate the use of the trochaic
word in the iambic foot, we may employ the first line of Jonson's
lyric, Drink to me only with thine eyes. Here we have a trochee
for the first foot and iambs for the remainder; but the word only
is itself trochaic and echoes the trochaic foot with which the line
opens and at the same time functions in two iambic feet.

(2) Quantity. Quantity is an element of poetic rhythm in
every language, regardless of whether the measure is based upon
it. In French, a relatively unaccented language of which the
verse is purely syllabic, quantity and phrase-stress, which are
governed by no set rules, provide the chief sources of variation;
in English, quantity provides one major source of variation.

107

In an iambic foot, for example, the unaccented syllable may be
short and the accented syllable long (there is no strict dividing
point, of course, between short and long, no two syllables being
of identical length, and no arbitrary categories being necessary
where the measure is not based upon quantity) : such a foot will
seem to be very heavily marked. On the other hand, it is quite
possible for the unaccented syllable to be very long and the ac-
cented syllable very short— consider, for example, the first foot, a
strictly iambic one, in this line of The Nightingales, by Robert
Bridges:

Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams.

The variations resulting from this principle can be very finely
shaded; so much so, in fact, as to obscure the accent on some
occasions.

(3) Varying Degrees of Accent. Accent, like quantity, is un-
limited in its variations. In practice, the manner of distinguishing
between an -accented and an unaccented syllable is superior, I be-
lieve, to the manner of distinguishing in classical verse between a
long syllable and a short. In English verse, a syllable is accented
or unaccented wholly in relation to the other syllables in the same
foot, whereas in classical verse each syllable is arbitrarily classified
by rule, and its length is in a very small measure dependent upon
the context. This makes for a greater fluidity and sensitivity in
English, I suspect, and with no loss of precision, perhaps with a
gain in precision. It also renders the spondaic and pyrrhic feet
theoretically impossible, as I have said, though they may some-
times be approximated; a close approximation of a pyrrhic is
usually followed by a close approximation of a spondaic as in the
following line:

Through rest or motion the noon walks the same.2

The latter half of the word motion and the article following form
a fair pyrrhic, the two subsequent words a spondaic.

8 From Noon at Neebish, by Don Stanford, Hound and Horn, VII-4.
1 08

If we take Ben Jonson's line, "Drink to me only with thine
eyes/' we find that with is accented in relation to the syllable pre-
ceding it, but that it is more lightly accented than the unaccented
syllable of the subsequent foot. One has, in other words, a mount-
ing series of four accents, which can be formally divided into
two iambic feet, and which is in addition emphasized by an al-
most equally progressive quantitative series. A very slight shift of
emphasis in each of these two feet would have made them resem-
ble the two in the line previously quoted, the pyrrhic followed
by the spondaic; yet the pyrrhic-spondaic combination appears
strikingly abnormal as one reads it, and the sequence by Jonson
glides by almost imperceptibly.

This rule in regard to the variation of accent is normally over-
looked by metrists; it is wholly overlooked, for example, by Robert
Bridges. The oversight results in Bridges' refusal to differentiate,
so far as terminology is concerned— though he differentiates
sharply in actual practice— between what I have called accentual-
syllabic and syllabic meters : Bridges applies the term syllabic in-
discriminately to both, and this confusion vitiates in a serious
manner, I believe, the general conclusions of his work on Milton's
prosody: he scans Milton incorrectly, it appears to me, for this
reason, and more particularly Milton's later work, which merely
represents learned variation to an extreme degree from a per-
fectly perceptible accentual-syllabic norm, variation expressive of
very violent feeling.

(4) Sprung Meter. Sprung meter is loosely described by Hop-
kins in his preface to his poems. It consists essentially of the jux-
taposition of heavily and more or less equally accented syllables
by other means than normal metrical inversion; it is thus a normal
and characteristic phenomenon of English syllabic meter, as
written by Robert Bridges and by Elizabeth Daryush, meter in
which accents may be combined at will, since they have no part
in the measure, and it is equally characteristic of purely accentual
meter, in which the measure is based on the number of accents
and on nothing else, so that monosyllabic feet may easily occur in
sequence. When sprung meter occurs as a variant of normal ac-
centual-syllabic meter, it represents, actually, the abandonment,

109

for the moment, of the accentual-syllabic norm in favor either of
the syllabic or of an accentual norm.

Wyatt employs the accentual variety of sprung rhythm, that in
which an unaccented syllable is dropped from between two
accented, so that a monosyllabic foot occurs, as in the second line
below:

They flee from me, that sometimes did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.3

Robert Green, whom Hopkins names as the last English poet to
use sprung meter, employs the same species as a variant on his
seven-syllable-couplets :

Up I start, forth went I,

With her face to feed mine eye.4

The norm of this line is iambic tetrameter, with the initial unac-
cented syllable omitted; in the first line above, an additional
unaccented syllable is dropped between the second and third ac-
cented. Green often writes a line of this kind, but with the initial
unaccented syllable returned to its place, so that the syllable count
is undisturbed:

That when 1 woke, 1 'gan swear,
Phyllis beauty palm did loear?

A more normal, perhaps a more true, example of syllabic
sprung rhythm within an accentual-syllabic poem, is the follow-
ing line from a poem by Barnabe Googe, Of Money:*

Fair face show friends when riches do abound.

Here the accentual weight of the first and third places is increased
to equal approximately the weight of the second and fourth; we

» and 4 and 5 Oxford Book of 16th Century Vsrse, pages 51, 382, and 381.
°Arber's English Reprints.

no

might describe the first two feet as spondaic, except that, as there
is no compensatory pair of pyrrhics, two extra accents are intro-
duced into the line, with the result that the accentual measure is
abandoned and we have no measure left save the purely syllabic.

Robert Bridges' poem, A Passerby, whatever may have been the
intention of the author, can be scanned as a poem in iambic
pentameter, with certain normal substitutions, and with examples
at irregular intervals of both kinds of sprung meter.

The first of the two lines below, written by the present author,
contains both kinds of sprung meter within a single line:

Warm mind, warm heart, beam, bolt, and lock,

You hold the love you took, and now at length. . . .7

The first four syllables are modeled on the first four in the line by
Googe; the next two shift to accentual meter, for each represents
a single foot; the last two syllables are a perfect iambic foot. The
line is a variant within a sonnet in iambic pentameter; it con-
tains, according to the scansion just given, eight syllables, five
feet, seven accented syllables (six of them being in unbroken se-
quence), and one unaccented syllable. Variants so extraordinary
as this are seldom wholly admirable, and this one is offered pri-
marily as an example and a curiosity.

The reader will find a particularly fine example of sprung
meter in a poem wholly syllabic, in Still-Life, by Elizabeth Dar-
yush;8 of sprung meter in a poem wholly accentual in Inversnaid,
by Gerard Hopkins.

7 In a pamphlet called Before Disaster, published by Tryon Pamphlets,
Tryon, N. C.

8 This poem appears in full near the end of this essay, and is quoted from
The Last Man, and Other Poems, by Elizabeth Daryush, Oxford Press, Eng-
land. Mrs. Daryush has published four other books of importance: Verses: First
to Fourth Books inclusive. She is one of the few first-rate poets living, and is
all but unknown.

Ill

Section III: THE SCANSION OF FREE VERSE

I SHALL BEGIN the description of my system for the scansion of
free verse with an account of two poems of my own and of what
I endeavored to accomplish in them. The foot which I have used
consists of one heavily accented syllable, an unlimited number of
unaccented syllables, and an unlimited number of syllables of
secondary accent. This resembles the accentual meter of Hop-
kins, except that Hopkins employed rhyme He appears to have
had the secondary accent, or subordinate and extra-metrical
"foot/* in mind, when he spoke of "hangers" and "outrides."

Accents, as I have already pointed out, cannot be placed in a
definite number of arbitrary categories; language is fluid, and a
syllable is accented in a certain way only in relation to the rest of
the foot. The secondary accent is discernible as a type if the poet
makes it so. A dozen types of accent are possible in theory, but in
practice no more than two can be kept distinct in the mind; in
fact it is not always easy to keep two.

Ambiguity of accent will be more common in such verse as I
am describing than in the older verse, but up to a certain point
this is not a defect, this kind of ambiguity being one of the chief
beauties of Milton's verse, for example. The poet must be permit-
ted to use his judgment in dubious instances, and the critic must
do his best to perceive the reason for any decision. Quantity will
obviously complicate this type of foot more than it will the foot
of the more familiar meters.

I shall mark and discuss two poems of my own, and shall then
proceed to specimens of free verse from some of the chief poets
of the Experimental generation, upon whose work my own ear
for this medium was trained. Since a line which is complete
metrically may for the sake of emphasis be printed as two lines, I
shall place a cross-bar (/) at the end of each complete line. I shall
number the lines which are so marked, for ease in reference.
Lines which are incomplete metrically, but which are independ-
ent and not parts of complete lines, will likewise be marked and
numbered, and these lines will also be marked with an asterisk

112

(*). I shall mark each primary stress with double points (") and
each secondary stress with a single point (0-

"Quod Tegit Omnia"

1 Earth darkens and is beaded/

2 with a sweat of hushes and/

3 the hear comes forth:
the mind stored -with/

4 magnificence proceeds into/

5 the mystery of Time, now/

6 certain of its choice of/

7 passion but uncertain of the/

8 passion's end.

When/

9 Plato temporizes on the nature/

10 of the plumage of the soul, the/

11 wind hums in the feathers as/

12 across a cord impeccable in/

13 taiitness but of nff mind:/

14 Time,
the sine-pondere> most/

1 5 imperturbable of elements,/

16 assumes its own proportions/

17 silently, of its own properties—/

18 an excellence at which one
sighs./

19 Adventurer in
living fact, the poet/

20 mounts into the spring/

21 upon his tongue the taste of/

22 air becoming body: is/

23 Embedded in this crystalline/

24 precipitate of Time./

"3

There are no incomplete lines in the preceding poem, though a
few lines are broken in two for the sake of emphasis.

The next poem is more difficult. I shall mark it as if it con-
tained two feet to the line, and as if most of the lines were printed
in two parts. The imperfect lines (unassimilable half-lines) are
marked with a single asterisk (*). Unbroken lines are marked
with a double asterisk (**).

The Bitter Moon

1 Dry snow runs burning
on the ground like fire—/

2 the quick of Hell spin on
the wind. Should I Relieve/

3 in this your body, take it

at its word? 1 have believed/

4 in nothing. Earth burns with a
shadow that has held my/

5 flesh; the eye is a shadow
that consumes the mind/

6 * Scream into air! The voices/

7 ** Of the dead still vibrate-/

8 they will find them, threading
all the past with twinging/

9 ** wires alive like hair in cold./

10 * These are the nerves/

11 ** of death. 1 am its brain./

12 ** You are the way, the oath/

13 I take. I hold to this-

I bent and thwarted by a will/

14 ** to live among the living dead/

15 ** instead of the dead living; I/

16 * become a voice to sound for./

17 ** Can you feel through Space,/

18 ** imagine beyond Time?

The/

114

19 snow alive with moonlight
licks about my ankles./

20 ** Can you find this end?/

This poem is marked, as I have said, as if it contained two feet
to the line. It is possible, however, to regard the poem as having
a one-foot line, in which case the lines marked with the single
asterisk and those unmarked are regular, and those marked with
the double asterisk are irregular. The two-foot hypothesis involves
the smaller number of irregular lines, and it would eliminate for
this poem a difficulty in the matter of theory; to wit the question
of whether a one-foot line is a practical possibility. Consider, for
example, the possibility of a poem in iambic lines of one foot
each. The poem will be, if unrhymed, equal to an indefinite
progression of iambic prose. But in reply, one may object that
except for iambic pentameter, and except for occasional imitations
of classical verse, no unrhymed verse has ever been successful in
English in the past, and that Herrick, at any rate, composed one
excellent poem in lines each of one iambic foot ("Thus I / Pass
by / To Die/' etc.) I believe that this discussion will show that
the secondary accent makes possible the use of unrhymed lines of
any length, from one foot up to as many as can be managed in
any other form of meter whether rhymed or not.

In the poem preceding the last, there was very little difficulty
in distinguishing between the primary and the secondary accents;
the trouble lay in distinguishing between secondary accents and
unaccented syllables. But when, as here, it is the two types of
stress that are hard to separate, we stand in danger of losing
entirely our system of measurement. Now, if the meter is success-
ful, there are in this poem two meters running concurrently and
providing a kind of counterpoint: one is the free-verse meter,
marked by the heavy beats, and the other is an iambic meter,
marked by all the beats, whether heavy or light. The poem can-
not be arranged in blank verse, however, for the iambic passages
are incomplete, are fragments laid in here and there to provide
musical complication and for the sake of their connotative value.
If the heavy beats cannot be heard as distinct from the light, then

"5

the free verse scheme vanishes and one has left only a frag-
mentary blank verse, badly arranged.

Mr. William Rose Ben£t, in the Saturday Review of Literature
(New York) for September 6, 1930, objected to the structure of
my own free verse, at the same time offering realignments of two
passages, which he regarded as superior to my own alignments.
A few weeks later, he published a letter from myself, which
stated, and for the first time in public, the general principles
which I am now discussing. One of his revisions was of the open-
ing lines of the poem which I have just quoted. He heard only
the incomplete blank verse and rearranged the passage accord-
ingly, some of the available fragments of blank verse, however,
being broken in ways that were to myself inexplicable.

My own free verse was very often balanced on this particular
tight-rope. During the period in which I was composing it, I was
much interested in the possibility of making the stanza and
wherever possible the poem a single rhythmic unit, of which the
line was a part not sharply separate. This effect I endeavored to
achieve by the use of run-over lines, a device I took over from Dr.
Williams, lUiss Moore, and Hopkins, and by the extreme use of
a continuous iambic undercurrent, so arranged that it could not
be written successfully as blank verse and that it would smooth
over the gap from one line of free verse to the next.

In the standard meters, the run-over line tends to be awkward
because of the heavy rhythmic pause at the end of each line:
Milton alone, perhaps, has been highly and uniformly successful
in the employment of the device, and he has been so by virtue of
the greatest example of the grand manner in literature, a conven-
tion so heightened as to enable him to employ this device, which
in most poets is destructively violent, as a basis for sensitive
modulations of rhetoric. Even in Websterian verse the line-end is
too heavily marked for the run-over to be pleasing. But if the
rhythm can be made to run on rapidly, the meaning can be
allowed to do so with impunity: hence the terminations in arti-
cles, adjectives, and similar words so common in free verse of
this type, and even the frequent terminations in mid-word to be
observed in Hopkins and in Miss Moore, this last liberty, of
116

course, being common also in classical verse, in which, as in
much free verse, the line-end pause is frequently extremely slight.
Of the dangers of this type of free verse I shall have more to say
later.

In the poem last quoted, much of the metrical ambiguity arises
from the use of an unusually long foot, which allows quantity
an opportunity somewhat greater than usual to obscure the ac-
cent. In the line, "at its word? I have believed/* word receives the
primary accent, but Relieved, which receives a secondary accent,
is longer and may seem more heavily accented to the unwary.
In the line "flesh; the eye is a shadow," the heavy accent goes to
eye, but flesh, because of its position at the beginning of the line
and before the semi-colon, receives more length than it would
receive in most other places, and may seem for the moment to
receive the main accent. In most cases, the reader will find that
the ambiguity is one of alternatives; that is, he will naturally
place a heavy accent on one word or on the other, so that the
pattern will not be damaged. Ambiguities of this sort, and within
the limits just mentioned, may be a source of value; they are, as I
have said, one of the principle beauties of Milton's versification.
If the ambiguity, in free verse, however, ceases to be a hesitation
between alternatives, and becomes more general, the metrical
norm is destroyed.

The poets from whom I learned to write free verse are prob-
ably better subjects than myself for a demonstration of the theory.
The poem quoted below, which is by Dr. Williams, contains two
lines of double length, each of which I have marked with an
asterisk:

To Waken an Old Lady

1 Old tige is

2 a flight of small

3 cheeping birds

4 skimming

5 hare trees

6 above a snow glaze.

7 * Gaining and failing,

117

8 they are buffeted

9 by a dark wind—

10 but what?

r

11 On the harsh weedstalks

12 the flock has rested—

13 the snow

14 is covered with broken

15 seed-husks,

16 and the wind tempered

17 with a shnll

18 * piping of plenty.

It will be observed that free verse requires a good deal of vari-
ation from line to line if the poem is to keep moving, and that as
the one-foot line permits only a limited amount of variation if the
foot is not to be stretched out to the danger-point, the poet must
choose between a very short poem and a good sprinkling of irreg-
ular lines.

H. D.'s^Orchard is one of the principal masterpieces of the
free-verse movement. It employs a one-foot line, with fourteen
lines of double length out of a total of thirty lines :

1 J saw the first pear

2 As it fell

3 * The honey-seeking, golden-banded,

4 The yellow swarm

5 Was not more fleet than I

6 * (Spare us from loveliness!)

7 And I jell prostrate,

8 Crying

9 * "You have flayed us with your blossoms;

10 * Spare us the beauty

11 Of fruit-trees!"

12 The honey-seeking

13 Paused not;
118

14 * The air thundered their song

15 * And I dime was prostrate.

16 O rcwgh-hewn

17 God of the orchard

18 * I bring you an offering;

19 Do you alone unbeautiful

20 Son of the god

21 * Spare us from lovelinessl

22 These fallen hazel-nuts

23 * Stripped late of their green sheaths;

24 * Grapes, red-purple,

25 Their berries

26 * Dripping with wine;

27 * Pomegranates already broken

28 And shrunken figs

29 * And quinces untouched

30 * I bring you as offering.

Some of the details of this poem should be mentioned. Where
there is a long foot, the heavily accented syllable usually appears
to receive much less weight than in a short foot, the crowd of
minor syllables absorbing emphasis from the major syllable. This
absorption is sometimes, though not invariably, facilitated by the
placing of two long feet in a single line. Line three is an example
of this rule; line nine is an exception to it. The position of the
accent in these lines is relevant to their respective effects: in line
three, the accent is at the beginning of each foot, with the sec-
ondary accent and the unaccented syllables following in a rapid
flicker, an arrangement which makes for speed; in line nine, the
accent falls near the end of the foot, an arrangement which
makes for a heavy stop; in both lines the second foot repeats the
arrangement of the first foot, except for the very light syllable
before the first heavy accent in line three, an arrangement which
makes for clarity and emphasis of rhythm.

119

If the reader will examine again some of the preceding poems,
he will find that this device of occasional repetition, either within
the line or from line to line, may be used effectively for another
purpose: it may provide the poet with a kind of pause, or mo-
ment of balance, between different movements, both of them
rapid, a pause which is roughly analogous to a pause at the end
of a line in the older meters.

Miss Marianne Moore has carried the method of continuity, of
unbroken rush, farther than anyone, not even excepting Hopkins.
The following lines are from her poem, A Grave. Since an ex-
tremely long foot is employed, in an extremely long line, I have
placed a cross-bar at the end of each foot:

1 men lower nets,/ unconscious of the fact/ that they are

desecrating/ a grave,/

2 and row quickly/ away/ the blades/ of the oars/

3 moving together like the/ feet of water-spiders/ as if there

were no such thing/ as death./

4 The wrinkles progress/ upon themselves in a phalanx,/

beautiful/ under networks of foam,/

5 and fade breathlessly/ while the sea rustles/ in and out of/

the seaweed./

Most of the generalizations drawn from the poem by H. D.
could be as well illustrated by examples taken from this passage.
I have spoken of the remarkably continuous movement in
Miss Moore's verse; but Miss Moore is seldom wholly at one with
her meter. There may be, as in this passage, brilliant onomato-
poetic effects, but the breathlessness of the movement is usually
in contrast to the minuteness of the details, and this contrast
frequently strengthens the half-ominous, half-ironic quality of
the details, at the same time that it is drawing them rather forci-
bly into a single pattern. This is not a defect, at least in the
shorter poems: it is a means of saying something that could have
been said in no other way; and what is said is valuable. But the
instrument is highly specialized and has a very narrow range of
effectiveness.

120

A further danger inherent in the instrument becomes apparent
in Miss Moore's longer poems, such as Marriage and The Octo-
pus. These poems are at once satiric and didactic, but the satiric
and didactic forms require of their very nature a coherent ra-
tional frame. The poems have no such frame, but are essentially
fragmentary and disconnected. The meter, however, is emphati-
cally continuous, and creates a kind of temporary illusion of com-
plete continuity: it is a conventional continuity which never
receives its justification. Despite the brilliance of much of the
detail, this unsupported convention is as disappointing as the
Miltonic convention in Thomson; it is a meaningless shell. In
the shorter poems, the stated theme often correlates the details
rationally.

Dr. W. C. Williams once remarked to me in a letter that free
verse was to him a means of obtaining widely varying speeds
within a given type of foot. I believe that this describes what we
have seen taking place in the examples of free verse which I have
analyzed. But if the secondary accent becomes negligible for
many lines in sequence, if, in other words, the speed from foot to
foot does not vary widely, the poem becomes one of two things:
if the accentuation is regular, the poem is unrhymed metrical
verse of the old sort; or if the accentuation is irregular, the poem
may be a loose unrhymed doggerel but will probably be prose.
Or there may be an uneven mixture of regularity and of irregu-
larity, which is the possibility least to be desired.

The opening of Richard Aldington's Choricos illustrates the
mixture of free and regular verse:

1 The ancient songs

2 Pass deathward mournfully.

3 Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths,

4 Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings—

5 Symbols of ancient songs

6 Mournfully passing

7 Down to the great white surges. . . .

121

The first four lines comprise three perfect lines of blank verse
Elsewhere in the same poem, we may find free verse aban-
doned for prose, the line-endings serving only as a kind of punc-
tuation:

1 And silently,

2 And with slow feet approaching,

3 And with bowed head and unlit eyes

4 We kneel before thee,

5 And thou, leaning toward us,

6 Caressingly layest upon us

7 flowers from thy thin cold hands;

8 Andy smiling as a chaste woman

9 Knowing love in her heart,

10 Thou sealest our eyes.

11 And the illimitable quietude

12 Comes gently upon us.

The first three lines of this passage might pass for free verse of
the same kind that Mr. Aldington has used elsewhere in the
same poem^but line four, in spite of the fact that it can be given
two major accents, does not continue the movement previously
established. Line eight is similarly troublesome, and the remain-
ing lines are uncertain. The difficulty is not mathematical but
rhythmic: the movement of the lines in the context is awkward
and breaks down the context.

This passage raises and answers a rather troublesome question.
It is possible that any passage of prose— even the prose that I am
now writing— might be marked off into more or less discernible
feet of the kind that I have described, each foot having a heavy
accent and one or more or perhaps no light accents, and a vary-
ing number of relatively unaccented syllables. These feet could
then be written one or two or three to a line. Would the result
be free verse? I believe not.

We are supposing in the first place that the writer of prose will
instinctively choose syllables that fall naturally into three clearly
discernible classes; whereas this classification of syllables in free
verse is, in the long run, the result of a deliberate choice, even

122

though the poet may be guided only by ear and not by theory.
But let us for the sake of argument neglect this objection.

The accented syllables are necessary to free verse, but more is
necessary: the remaining syllables must be disposed in such a
way as to establish an harmonious and continuous movement.
But can the laws of this harmonious and continuous movement
be defined? That is, can one define every possible type of free
verse foot and can one then establish all of the combinations
possible and rule out all the unsatisfactory combinations? I have
never gone into this subject experimentally, but I believe that
one can demonstrate rationally that the compilation of such laws
is impossible.

The free verse foot is very long, or is likely to be. No two feet
composed of different words can ever have exactly the same
values either of accent or of quantity. If one will mark off the
passage quoted from Mr. Aldington, for example, one will get
certain combinations which are unsuccessful; but one cannot say
that the duplication of the same series of accent marks in a dif-
ferent group of words will be unsuccessful, because the duplica-
tion of accent marks will not mean the duplication of the exact
weights and lengths of the original passage. The free verse foot is
simply too long and too complicated to be handled in this way.
If the reader feels that this proves free verse to be no verse at all,
I have two answers: first, that he will have the same difficulty
with any other purely accentual verse, from the Anglo-Saxon to
Hopkins and with any purely syllabic; secondly, that if the
rhythms which I have described can be perceived in a fairly large
number of poems, and if the failure to establish such rhythms
can be perceived in other poems, one has a rhythmic system
distinguishable from prose and frequently of poetic intensity,
and it matters very little what name it goes by. What is really
important is the extent of its usefulness, its effect upon poetic
convention.

I do not wish to claim that the poets of whom I write in this
essay had my system of scansion in mind when writing their
poems. Probably none of them had it. What I wish to claim is
this: that the really good free verse of the movement can be

123

scanned in this way, and that the nature of our language and the
difficulties of abandoning the old forms led inevitably to this
system, though frequently by way of a good deal of uncertain
experimenting.

Mr. Aldington's Choricos is an attempt to combine certain tra-
ditional meters, English and classical, and a little biblical prose,
in a single poem, just as Hugo, for example, employed different
meters in a single poem, but this procedure, whether employed
by Hugo or by Richard Aldington, is inevitably too loose to be
satisfactory. Other poets have quite deliberately employed simple
prose rhythms. Sometimes the prose is very good, as in One City
Only, by Alice Corbin, or as in a few poems by Mina Loy. But
it is not verse, and it is not often a satisfactory medium for
poetic writing.

The masters of free verse of the Experimental Generation are
William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wal-
lace Stevens, H. D., and perhaps Mina Loy in a few poems,
though the movement of Mina Loy's verse is usually so simpli-
fied, so denuded of secondary accent, as to be indistinguishable
from prose. Mr. Eliot never got beyond Websterian verse, a
bastard variety, though in Gerontion, he handled it with great
skill—with far greater skill than Webster usually expends upon
it. Mr. T. Sturge Moore, at the very beginning of the twentieth
century, published a very brilliant and very curious specimen of
experimental meter, in The Rout of the Amazons, which, like
the neo-Websterian verse of Mr. Eliot and of others, employs
blank verse as its norm, but departs farther from the norm than
the neo-Websterian poets have been able to depart, and, unlike
the neo-Websterian verse, never seems to approach prose, but
rather approaches a firm and controlled free verse as its extreme
limit.

Free verse has been all but abandoned by the next generation :
a few good specimens are to be found in minor poems by Glen-
way Wescott, Grant Code, and the late Kathleen Tankersley
Young; but Messrs. Wescott and Code have written their best
poems in other forms, and so have all of their ablest contem-
poraries.

124

A major objection to free verse as it has been written by H. D.,
Dr. Williams, and perhaps others, and the objection can be
raised against much of Hopkins as well, is this: that it tends to a
rapid run-over line, so that the poem, or in the case of a fairly
long poem, the stanza or paragraph, is likely to be the most im-
portant rhythmic unit, the lines being secondary. Hopkins was
aware of this tendency in his poems, but apparently not of its
danger. In his own preface to his poems, he writes: ". . . it is
natural ... for the lines to be rove over, that is, for the scan-
ning of each line immediately to take up that of the one before,
so that if the first has one or more syllables at its end the other
must have as many the less at its beginning; and in fact the
scanning runs on without break from the beginning, say, of a
stanza to the end and all the stanza is one long strain, though
written in lines asunder/' The result is a kind of breathless rush,
which may very. well be exciting, but which tends to exclude
or to falsify all save a certain kind of feeling, by enforcing what
I have called, in my essay on Poetic Convention, a convention
of heightened intensity.

Hopkins meets the difficulty by excluding from his poetry
nearly all feeling that is not ecstatic; Dr. Williams meets it by
allowing and utilizing a great deal of language that is largely
conventional. But if a poem is written wholly in conventional
language, it becomes, when the convention is of this type, merely
melodramatic and violent, and, when the convention is of some
other type, weak in some other and corresponding manner. Dr.
Williams has thrown away much good material thus; so has H.
D. done; and so have others.

The extremely abnormal convention is seldom necessary, I be-
lieve, to the expression of powerful feeling. Shakespeare can be
just as mad in a sonnet as can Hopkins, and he can be at the same
time a great many other things which Hopkins cannot be. He
has a more limber medium and is able to deal with more complex
feelings. I mean by this, that if no one quality receives extreme
emphasis, many diverse qualities may be controlled simultane-
ously, but that if one single quality (the ecstasy of the thirteenth
century lyric, Alisoun, for example) does receive extreme em-

125

phasis, it crowds other qualities out of the poem. The meter, the
entire tone, of Alisoun, render impossible the overtone of grief
which would have been present had Hardy dealt with the same
material, and which would 'have given the poem greater scope,
greater universality. One may state it as a general law, moral as
well as metrical, that an increase in complexity commonly results
in a decrease in emphasis: extreme emphasis, with the resultant
limitation of scope, is a form of unbalance. Sexual experience is
over-emphasized in the works of D. H, Lawrence, because Law-
rence understood so little else— and consequently understood sex-
ual experience so ill. In a very few poems, notably in the sonnet
To R. B., Hopkins avoids his usual tone in a considerable meas-
ure, by reverting toward standard meter. His rhymes and his con-
sequent independence of the secondary accent enable him to do
this, but a similar reversion is impossible in free verse, a medium
in which the reversion would simply result in a break-down of
form. It is difficult to achieve in free verse the freedom of move-
ment and the range of material offered one by the older forms.

A few poems appear to indicate that a greater variety of feeling
is possible in free verse, however, than one might be led to sus-
pect by the poems thus far quoted. One of the best is The Snow
Man, by Wallace Stevens:

1 * One must have a mind of winter

2 To regard the frost and the houghs

3 Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

4 And have been cold a long time

5 * To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

6 The spruces rough in the distant glitter

7 Of the January sun; and not to think

8 Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

9 In the sound of a few leaves,

10 * Which is the sound of the land

1 1 Full of the same wind

12 That is blowing in the same hare place
126

13 For the listener, who listens in the snow,

14 And, nothing hims'elf, beholds

15 * Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The norm is of three beats, and there are four irregular lines, the
first and third having two beats each, the second and fourth hav-
ing four. Each line in this poem ends on a very heavy pause, pro-
vides, that is, a long moment of balance before the next move-
ment begins. The manner in which the secondary accents are
disposed in the fifth, sixth, and seventh lines, in order to level
and accelerate the line, is remarkably fine, as is also the manner
in which the beat becomes slow and heavy in the next few lines
and the way in which the two movements are resolved at the
close. There is complete repose between the lines, great speed
and great slowness within the line, and all in a very short poem.
Dr. Williams has got comparable effects here and there. The fol-
lowing poem by Dr. Williams is called The Widow's Lament in
Springtime:

1 Sorrow is my own yard

2 Where the new grass

3 Flames as it has flamed

4 often before, hut not

5 with the cold fire

6 that closes round me this year.

7 Thirty-five years

8 1 lived with my husband.

9 The plum-tree is white toddy

10 with masses of flowers.

1 1 Masses of flowers

12 load the cherry branches

13 and color some hushes

14 yellow and some red,

15 but the grief in my heart

16 is stronger than they;

17 for though they were my joy

18 formerly, today 1 notice them

127

19 and turn away forgetting.

20 Toddy my son told me

21 * That in the meadow

22 at the edge of the heavy woods

23 in the distance, he saw

24 trees of white flowers.

25 I feel that I would like

26 * to go there

27 and fall into those flowers

28 * and sink into the marsh near them.

The slow heavy movement of this poem of two-foot lines is ac-
centuated by the periodic swift lines (four, six, nine, thirteen
and fourteen, seventeen and eighteen and nineteen, twenty-two,
along with a few more or less intermediate lines, like one, ten,
eleven, twelve, and twenty-eight) out of which the slow lines
fall with greater emphasis. A poem of much greater length which
displays a remarkable range of feeling is Mr. T. Sturge Moore's
play (or, to be more exact, Eclogue) entitled The Rout of the
Amazons. Mr. Pound's Cantos offer a slow and deliberative
movement, but are as bound to it as is H. D. to her ecstasy.

There are at least two additional objections which I should
mention in connection with the tyranny of free-verse movements,
objections perhaps inclusive or causative of those already made;
namely, that two of the principles of variation— substitution and
immeasurably variable degrees of accent— which are open to the
poet employing the old meters, are not open to the poet employ-
ing free verse, for, as regards substitution, there is no normal foot
from which to depart, and, as regards accent, there is no foot to
indicate which syllables are to be considered accented, but the
accented syllable must identify itself in relation to the entire line,
the result being that accents are of fairly fixed degrees, and cer-
tain ranges of possible accent are necessarily represented by gaps.
In free verse the only norm, so far as the structure of the foot is
concerned, is perpetual variation, and the only principle govern-
ing the selection of any foot is a feeling of rhythmical continuity;
and on the other hand the norm of the line, a certain number of
128

accents of recognizably constant intensity, and in spite of the
presence of the relatively variable secondary accents, inevitably
results in the species of inflexibility which we have seen equally
in the fast meters of Williams and in the slow meters of Pound.
The free-verse poet, however, achieves effects roughly com-
parable to those of substitution in the old meters in two ways:
first by the use of lines of irregular length, a device which he
employs much more commonly than does the poet of the old
meters and with an effect quite foreign to the effect of too few or
of extra feet in the old meters; and, secondly, since the norm is
perpetual variation, by the approximate repetition of a foot or of
a series of feet. It is a question whether such effects can be em-
ployed with a subtlety equal to that of fine substitution. Per-
sonally I am convinced that they cannot be; for in traditional
verse, each variation, no matter how slight, is exactly perceptible
and as a result can be given exact meaning as an act of moral
perception. Exactness of language is always a great advantage,
and the deficiencies of free verse in this respect will be more
evident after an examination of some of the traditional meters.

Section IV: EXPERIMENTAL AND

TRADITIONAL METERS

IN DESCRIBING THE CONSEQUENCES of the swifter forms of free
verse and of the meters of Hopkins, I have indicated a general
principle which accounts for a definite and often-regretted tend-
ency in the history of English meter— the tendency of successive
generations of poets to level their meters more and more toward
the iambic, that is, toward the normal meter of the language, and
at the same time to simplify their rhyme schemes, to depart, at
least, from those schemes, which, like that of Alisoun, contribute
to a swift and lilting music or to some other highly specialized
effect. Without assuming the truth of any theories of evolution,
of progress, or of continuous development in poetry, we may
recognize the facts that within limited historical patterns, early
poetry is simple and later poetry is likely to be relatively complex,
these two adjectives being understood as relating to the content

129

of the poetry, the moral consciousness of the art; that, as the
complex poetry deadens, or, the commoner phenomenon, as the
critical sensibility to it deadens and the fashion begins to change,
there are likely to be new outbreaks of emphatic and relatively
simple, but nevertheless fresh, feeling, which eventually may
reinvigorate the older tradition.

How, then, can one reconcile in theory this tendency to in-
creasing complexity of feeling with the tendency to increasing
simplicity of means? The answer, I believe, is fairly simple. The
nearer a norm a writer hovers, the more able is he to vary his
feelings in opposite or even in many directions, and the more
significant will be his variations. I have observed elsewhere that
variations of any kind are more important in proportion as they
are habitually less pronounced: a man who speaks habitually at
the top of his voice cannot raise his voice, but a man who speaks
quietly commands attention by means of a minute inflection. So
elaborately and emphatically joyous a poem as Alisoun, for ex-
ample, can be only and exclusively joyous; but Hardy, in the
more level and calmer song, During Wind and Rain, can define
a joy fully as profound, indeed more profound, at the same time
that he is dealing primarily with a tragic theme. To extend the
comparison to free verse, H. D/s Orchard is purely ecstatic; it is
as limited in its theme as is Alisoun, and as specialized in its
meter. But Dr. Williams' poem, The Widow's Lament, is at once
simpler and calmer in meter and more profound in feeling. The
difference between these two poems, of course, is due wholly to a
difference in temperament, and not to the passage of centuries.
That a specimen of free verse can be found displaying a com-
plexity and a profundity comparable to those of such poems as
Hardy's During Wind and Rain and Bridges' Love not too much,
I do not believe; nor do I believe that such a poem can ever be
composed. For reasons that will become increasingly clear as this
discussion progresses, I believe that the nature of free verse is a
permanent obstacle to such a composition.

It is worth noting that the songs of Shakespeare are, for the
most part, the most varied and brilliant exhibitions of minutely
skillful writing which we possess, as well as the most song-like
130

of songs. They are likewise nearly as frail, nearly as minor, as
any wholly successful poetry could be. The sonnets, on the other
hand, remain, I suppose, our standard of the greatest possible
poetry; they are written in the normal line of our poetry and in
the simplest form of the sonnet.

The lilting movement of the sixteenth century lyrical meters,
of Sidney, of England's Helicon, disappears from the work of the
great masters of the seventeenth century. Even Herrick suggests
the old feeling ever so slightly, though quite deliberately— his
line has a stony solidity utterly foreign to the lyrics of fifty years
earlier. Donne employs at times movements which suggest the
earlier movements, as, for example, in the songs, Sweetest love 1
do not go, and Go and catch a falling star, but his bony step is
wholly different from the light pausing and shifting of Sidney; it
is a grimly serious parody. George Herbert's Church Monuments,
perhaps the most polished and urbane poem of the Metaphysical
School and one of the half dozen most profound, is written in
an iambic pentameter line so carefully modulated, and with its
rhymes so carefully concealed at different and unexpected points
in the syntax, that the poem suggests something of the quiet
plainness of excellent prose without losing the organization and
variety of verse.

Crashaw, in his most beautiful devotional poetry, employs
cadences and imagery suggestive of earlier love poetry and drink-
ing songs. Thus, in his paraphrase of the Twenty-third Psalm, he
writes :

When my wayward breath is flying^

He calls home my soul from dying.

This passage corresponds closely to a passage in a translation
made by Crashaw from an Italian love song, a fact which might
lead one to suspect that he sought deliberately for relationships
between disparate modes of experience and that the correspond-
ences—and there are many of them— in his other poems are not
accidental:

When my dying

Life is flying,

Those sweet airs, that often slew me

Shall revive we,

Or reprive me,
And to many deaths renew me.

The reader should observe that there is here not only a resem-
blance between the first couplet of the translated stanza and the
couplet of the psalm, but that the traditional image of physical
love, as it appears in the translated stanza, serves as a basis for
the image of salvation in the psalm; something similar occurs at
the climax of the famous poem to Saint Theresa; similar also is
the use, in his various references to the Virgin, of imagery bor-
rowed from Petrarchan love-poetry; similar also is his application
of Petrarchan wit to sacred subjects, as if he were, like some
celestial tumbler, displaying his finest training and ingenuity for
the greater glory, and out of the purest love, of God—in fact, it is
in Crashaw that the relationship between the Petrarchan conceit
and the Metaphysical conceit is perhaps most obvious. The para-
phrase of the psalm, which is the more complex and profound of
the two poems just mentioned, is written in couplets and ex-
hibits very few feminine rhymes. The sudden shift into the
feminine rhyme in this particular couplet gives an unexpected
and swiftly dissipated feeling of an earlier, more emphatic, and
more naive lyricism.

In the following couplet, likewise from the paraphrase of the
psalm, there is both in the meter and in the imagery a strong
suggestion of the poetry of conviviality:

How my head in ointment swims!
How my cup o'erlooks her hrims!

The head, of course, is not swimming with drink, and the cup is
the cup of bliss, but the instant of delirium is deliberately sought
and impeccably fixed. The meter contributes to this effect in two
ways: through the approximate coincidence of length and ac-
cent, with the resultant swift and simplified movement, and
through the almost exact metrical similarity of the two lines. The

13*

spiritualization, if one may employ such a term, of the convivial
image is partly, of course, the work of the context, but it is also,
in a large measure, the work of the startling word oerlooks,
which takes the place of the commoner and purely physical
oerflows: the word not only implies animation, but suggests a
trembling balance. The last couplet of the same poem recalls
the earlier love-lyrics in a similar manner:

And thence my ripe soul will I breath
Warm into the Arms of Death.

One can find many other passages in Crashaw's devotional
verse to illustrate this practice. Crashaw does not, in passages like
these, quote or borrow from earlier poetry; he does not ordinarily
even suggest a particular passage or line from an earlier poet.
Rather, by fleeting nuances of language, he suggests an anterior
mode of poetic expression and hence of experience, and in a con-
text which is new to it. More commonly than not, he suggests in
this manner not what is most striking in an earlier body of poetry
but what is most commonplace: an earlier poetic convention be-
comes the material of his perception, and contributes, along with
other, apparently disparate, and non-literary material, the ma-
terial of an extremely complex poetic structure. It is in ways such
as this that Crashaw is traditional; he is experimental in the ways
in which he pushes metaphor beyond the bounds of custom and
frequently even of reason. Crashaw is noted for his experiments;
the large amount of poetry in which the traditional predominates
and the experimental is under full control is too seldom appreci-
ated.

This illusion of simplicity, this retreat toward the norm, of
which I have been speaking, can, however, be achieved only by
those writers who have mastered the more emphatic and athletic
exercises; it is inconceivable that a poet insensitive to the fresh
and skillful enthusiasm of Sidney should achieve the subdued
complexity of Crashaw, Jonson, or Herrick. The beauty of the
later masters resides in a good measure in what they suggest and
refrain from doing, not in that of which they are ignorant or

133

incapable. Within the pattern of free verse, this kind of sugges-
tion is impossible: to depart from a given movement is to aban-
don it; the absence of a metrical frame accounting for the agree-
ment or variation of every syllable, heavy or light, and allowing
immeasurable variation of accent, makes exact and subtle vari-
ation and suggestion impossible. Similarly, there is no manner
in which the rhythms of a poem in free verse, such as H. D/s
Orchard, could be utilized or suggested in a poem in accentual-
syllabic meter, for the two systems are unrelated and mutually
destructive. In so far, however, as the difficulties of maintaining
rhythm in new and structurally unsatisfactory patterns, may
have forced poets and their readers to strain the attention upon
certain fine shades of accent and quantity, it is possible that
the free-verse poets may have eventually a beneficial effect upon
poets writing in accentual-syllabic verse; in so far as free verse
has encouraged careless substitution in the older meter, has en-
couraged an approximation of the movement of accentual-sylla-
bic verse to that of purely accentual, its effect has quite per-
ceptibly beenHindesirable. Eliot, Tate, and MacLeish exemplify
the latter influence.

Section V: THE HEROIC COUPLET

AND ITS RECENT RIVALS

A BRIEF STUDY of the heroic couplet and a comparison of the
couplet with certain forms that have been used for more or less
the same purposes as those which encouraged the couplet may
throw a little more light on our subject.

The chief masters of the heroic couplet during the period in
which it was the most widely used and the most widely useful
poetic instrument are: Dryden, Pope, Gay, Johnson, and Church-
ill. In Goldsmith and in Crabbe alike the instrument is relaxed
and the poem is diluted either with facile sentiment or with
plodding exposition, although much admirable poetry may be
found in these writers.

Dryden used the couplet for a wide variety of purposes. In his
Alneid, it is an adequate epic instrument, only a little inferior to

134

Milton's blank verse, the inferiority being so slight as to be fairly
attributable to the men and not to their instruments. As an ex-
ample of the grandeur to which Dryden is able to raise this form,
we may turn to the descent of yEneas into Hell in the sixth book,
a passage quoted by Saintsbury, and as fine in its way as the
original of Vergil.

Dryden employs the couplet as a powerful satirical instrument,
as the meter for some of our greatest didactic poetry, and, in the
opening lines of Religio Laid, as the medium for meditative
lyricism of a very high order.

By changing to feminine rhymes, by placing the cesura regu-
larly after the third foot, and by using an internal rhyme at this
point in the first two lines, Dryden transforms the couplet into a
song meter:

No, no poor suff'ring heart, no change endeavor;
Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her:
My ravished eyes behold such charms about her,
1 can die -with her but not live without her;
One tender sigh of hers to see me languish,
Will more than pay the price of my past anguish.
Beware, O cruel fair, how you smile on me;
'Twos a kind look of yours that has undone me.

Love has in store for me one happy minute.

And she will end my pain who did begin it:

Then no day void of bliss or pleasure leaving,

Ages shall slide away without perceiving;

Cupid shall guard the door, the more to please us,

And keep out time and Death, when they would seize us.

Time and Death shall depart, and say in flying,

Love has found out a way to live by dying.

The double meaning of the word dying and the compact wit re-
call slightly the Metaphysical School, as the former recalls also
the song-books; the subject also recalls the song-books, and so
does the careful suggestion of song-rhythm. Yet the poem has the

sophisticated plainness of Herrick. These suggestions of earlier,
simpler, and more emphatic modes are real, and they give a real
profundity to the poem, a profundity fixed in the pun on the last
word. It is a profundity of feeling, not of thought. The poem is
one of the best examples that I know of what can be accom-
plished by means of meticulous variations from a rigid norm.

Pope restricted the couplet more rigidly than did Dryden. In
fact, Pope, and his friend and disciple, Gay, represent the closest
approximation to what we now recognize as the normal form of
the instrument. Earlier poets appear to be converging consciously
toward Pope and Gay, who are, in turn, the norm from which
later poets consciously and carefully depart. Pope in particular is
crucial to the history of the form, partly by virtue of his very
deficiencies.

Pope, for example, had no talent for purely lyrical composi-
tion: his efforts in that direction resulted in the genteel inepti-
tude of A Dying Christian to His Soul, Eloisa to Abelard, and
the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. But his in-
ability so to express himself was compensated by, and may even
have caused/ a greater complexity of attitude and of subject iftat-
ter in his satirical and didactic poems than Dryden ever achieved
in any single work. This additional complication appears to be
roughly of three sorts: the illustration of the general with a
deeply personal allusion, such as occurs in the fine couplets on
Gay in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot; the intensification of the
heroic aspect of the mock-heroic passage, till it takes on, as does
the close of The Dunciad, a kind of metaphysical magnificence,
an intensity of terror which renders the satire all the more savage
and destructive; and the statement in language at once general,
concentrated, dignified, and pathetic of a truth both tragic and
so universal as to be wholly impersonal.

The first of these sources of complication, the introduction of
the pathos of private loss or of self-justification, is roughly the
subject matter of Churchill's greatest work, though Churchill's
approach differs profoundly from that of Pope, and in exploring
this particular field more fully than did Pope, Churchill in one
poem all but equals Pope's brilliance and range. The magnifi-

'36

cence of the mock-heroic is to be found before Pope, in Mac-
Flecknoe, especially in the passage which parodies Cowley's
great description of the underwaters of the sea, which occurs
near the opening of his Davideis, but the mock-heroic in Dryden
is primarily in the interests of hilarity. Gay, in The Birth of the
Squire, comes closer to Pope in this respect than does anyone
else, but with this difference: Gay has wit but no malice, and
almost invariably sympathizes with his victim and at moments
appears wholly charmed by him, with the result that his pathos
is humorous and particular rather than bare and universal. The
last source of complication, or perhaps one should say the last
mode in which Pope forces the didactic-satiric poem to invade
lyrical territory, represents nearly the sole mode in which Johnson
attains poetic greatness, and the mode in which Goldsmith
achieved what is perhaps his only moment of great poetry,

I have illustrated the first and second of these classes by refer-
ence to familiar passages. Let me illustrate the last by quotation.
Pope writes in An Essay on Man:

Heav'n forming each on other to depend,

A master, or a servant, or a friend,

Bids each on other for assistance call,

Till one mans weakness grows the strength of all.

Wants, frailties, passions, closer still ally

The common int'rest, or endear the tie.

To these we owe true friendship, love sincere,

Each home-felt joy that life inherits here;

Yet from the same we learn, in its decline,

Those joys, those loves, those interests to resign;

Taught half by Reason, half Toy mere decay,

To welcome Death, and calmly pass away.

It is this kind of pathos in isolation and perhaps more profoundly
felt which renders memorable The Vanity of Human Wishes
and more particularly Johnson's two great prologues, to Comus
and to A Word to the Wise. It is this kind of pathos to which
Goldsmith builds in a few brief climactic passages in The De-

'37

serted Village, but especially in the following couplets, more
famous, perhaps, in our own age for what may appear their
democratic morality than for their rhetorical grandeur:

111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a hold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed can never he supplied.

We might summarize these distinctions thus: Dryden touches
successfully upon a wider range of experience than does Pope,
and employs the couplet successfully in a greater variety of styles;
but Pope through the concentration of his entire forces upon a
single method achieves a greater range in certain individual
poems than Dryden ever achieves in a single poem; Pope con-
tains the germs of all the masters of the couplet to follow him
in his century save Crabbe, and all of them save Crabbe achieve
greatness by^developing some one aspect of feeling to be found in
Pope; Johnson, nevertheless, attains a greatness, even a universal-
ity, in a few poems, which appears scarcely inferior to Pope,
chiefly by virtue of the way in which the dignity and grandeur of
his character, his curious combination of private bitterness, pub-
lic generosity, and Christian humility qualify his apprehension
of relatively simple themes. It should be noted also, that if Dry-
den employs the couplet for a wide diversity of ends, by means of
small variations, Pope, in combining a comparable diversity into
a single complexity, varies the couplet noticeably less than does
Dryden; yet he is successful, to the reader familiar with his sensi-
bility he is one of the most exquisitely finished, as well as one of
the most profoundly moving, poets in English. Churchill I re-
serve for detailed treatment. He is the most radical innovator in
the history of the couplet, and by means of his innovations he
uncovered a range of feeling, and created a poetry, as complex in
their way, perhaps, as those of Pope, though he lived to master
his discoveries in one poem only.

138

Churchill's early work contributes nothing of importance to
the development of heroic verse: it is frequently good— the man-
nerisms described in The Rosciad are amusing, though little
more— but it attempts nothing that Dryden had not already ac-
complished with greater brilliancy.

The Candidate, however, introduces a new procedure and a
new quality of feeling into satirical verse, and the very structure
of the poem forces one to study the innovation if one is not to
remain, as a reader of it, suspended in ambiguity. The poem
is directed against Lord Sandwich, who sought the Highsteward-
ship of Cambridge, in spite of his notoriously licentious and un-
scholarly career. The poem, after various preliminaries, gives us
a portrait of Lothario, a kind of ideal rake, whose identity is not
given, but who is really Sandwich in disguise. At the conclusion
of this portrait, the poet informs us that Nature, aghast at having
created such a monster, by way of atonement gave us Sandwich,
too. There follows a long account of Sandwich under his own
name, an account which has at the outset all the appearance of
the warmest eulogy; as one proceeds, one gradually begins to
feel the undertone of irony, an undertone which becomes more
and more evident, until, after several pages, Sandwich and his
friends are being openly pilloried. This sort of thing, to the best
of my knowledge, had never been done before; and to the best
of my knowledge no one has ever pointed out that Churchill did
it; Churchill, like Gascoigne at an earlier period and like Johnson
in his own, was a great master obscured by history, that is, by
the mummification, for purposes of immortal exhibition, of a
current fashion— Gray and Collins, slighter poets in spite of all
their virtues, were of the party that produced the style of the
next century and they have come to be regarded, for this reason,
as the best poets of their period. We have not in The Candidate
the mock-heroic convention of MacFlecknoe or of Hudibras,
which, though it involves feigned praise, is frank burlesque. It
is closer to a quality of Pope, to which I have already referred,
but it is ironical rather than epigrammatical; it is more evasive,
less didactic or illustrative of the general, more personal, closer
to the sophisticated lyrical tradition of such writers as Gascoigne,

139

Ben Jonson, and Donne. Churchill, in his ambiguous territory
between irony and eulogy, awakened a number of feelings be-
longing neither to irony nor to eulogy, but capable of joining
with both, and the most perfect example of the junction may be
found in his greatest poem, the posthumous Dedication to War-
burton. The poem opens thus:

Health to great Glo'sterl—from a man unknown,
Who holds thy health as dearly as his own,
Accept this greeting— nor let modest fear
Call up one maiden blush— I mean not here
To wound with flattery; 'tis a villains art,
And suits not with the frankness of my heart.
Truth best becomes an orthodox divine,
And, spite of Hell, that character is mine:
To speak e'en hitter truths I cannot fear;
But truth, my lord, is panegyric here.

Health to great Glo'sterl—nor, through love of ease,
Which all priests love, let this address displease.
1 ask no favor, not one note I crave,
And when this busy brain rests in the grave,
(For till that time it never can have rest)
I will not trouble you with one bequest.
Some humbler friend, my mortal journey done,
More near in blood, a nephew or a son,
In that dread hour executor I'll leave,
For 1, alas! have many to receive;
To give, but little.— To great Glo'ster health!
Nor let thy true and proper love of wealth
Here take a false alarm—in purse though poor,
In spirit I'm right proud, nor can endure
The mention of a bribe— thy pocket's free.

The feeling, and, as I have said, it is a new kind of feeling, is
deeply involved in the rhythms, especially in the relationship of
syntax to versification. The long and involved sentence, with its
numerous parenthetical interruptions, hesitations, and after-
140

thoughts, is foreign to the other masters of the couplet. It appears
in Churchill's earlier work in a crude form, but here it carries as
high a polish as anything in Pope. The style is more different
from Dryden, Pope, Gay, or Johnson than they are from each
other, and it is probably a more complex style than any one of
them ever achieved, though all of them are sufficiently complex,
Pope and Johnson especially so; Churchill does not, as did Dry-
den, vary the epigrammatic norm of the familiar couplet, but he
established a different norm, from which he can, by means of
suggestion, utilize the norm of Pope much as Dryden and Cra-
shaw utilized the song-books, at the same time that he is engaged
in arriving at a very different end. His poetry is one of profound
and bitter innuendo.

The heroic couplet must have certain qualities which enable
the poet employing it to pass easily from description, to lyricism,
to didacticism, to satire, and so on, or even at times to combine
several of these qualities at a single stroke. It is doubtful whether
so much freedom is possible in blank verse; the only satirical poet
who has employed blank verse with major success is Ben Jonson,
and much of his satire depends upon significance derived from
the structure of the play— the details from line to line are usually
variations upon an anterior theme rather than autonomous sum-
maries. Ben Jonson himself employed the heroic couplet in some
of his shorter poems, when he wished to indulge in a more direct
and concentrated attack, and with remarkable vigor, in spite of
the roughness of his versification. As a didactic instrument, blank
verse is comparatively heavy and comparatively incapable of
epigrammatic point; as a lyrical instrument, the range of blank
verse, though wide, tends to be more closely limited to the gran-
diloquent and is less capable (in spite of charming passages in
Fletcher and of Tears Idle Tears) of approaching the flexibility
and variety of song. The heroic couplet, all things considered,
appears to be the most flexible of forms: it can suggest by discreet
imitation, the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable;
it can contain all of these effects, if need be, in a single poem.

What, then, makes the couplet so flexible? The answer can be
given briefly: its seeming inflexibility. That is, the identity of the

141

line is stronger in rhymed verse than in unrhymed, because a
bell is rung at the end of every second line; the identity of the
line will be stronger in the couplet than in any other stanza be-
cause the couplet is the simplest and most obvious form of stanza
possible. This mathematical and almost mechanical recurrence of
line and stanza provides an obvious substructure and core of
connotation over which poetic variations may move, from which
they derive an exact identity. There is, in addition, a norm within
the norm, at least in the case of every master save Churchill, the
norm of the Popian couplet; and even Churchill can refer to this
norm from a distance.

In spite of this regularity of basic scheme, there is no confine-
ment of variation. The secondary rhythmic relationships of the
couplet are unhampered by the rigidity of the primary, and the
resultant set of relationships (the tertiary) between the constant
element and the varying element, will be therefore unlimited, at
the same time, however, that the constant element is providing a
permanent point of reference, or feeling of cohesion, for the
whole. The poet may move in any direction whatever, and his
movement will be almost automatically graduated by the metro-
nomic undercurrent of regularity; and if he chooses at certain
times to devote himself to prosaic explanation, the metronome
and the Popian balance, emerging naked, are capable of giving
his prose an incisiveness possible in no other form, and of main-
taining the relationship of the didacticism to the rest of the poem
—the relationship in regard to feeling, I mean, for a didactic pas-
sage would of necessity represent by explicit statement the ra-
tional relationships within the poem.

A longer stanza is likely to be tyrannical. Within a single Spen-
serian stanza, for example, one cannot gracefully abandon a
thought and take up another, nor can one let a thought run over
a large number of stanzas. In the couplet we may have an en-
tirely free play of thought over a rigid metrical substructure; in
the longer stanza, thought and stanzaic structure must, very
largely, coincide. To state it otherwise, in the long stanza the
varying and constant elements which have already been men-
tioned in connection with heroic verse tend to fuse in a single
142

movement, which, if protracted, becomes monotonous; whereas
the poet employing couplets and employing at the same time a
sufficiently comprehensive plot or frame, could move at will
through all the complexities of Churchill and through all the
pure and isolated moods to be found in Dryden— it would be
largely a matter of timing.

Such a form, it seems to me, is the desideratum of those poets,
who, following more or less in the wake of Mr. Eliot, have en-
deavored to employ a more or less Websterian verse as a carry-all
meter. Websterian verse is much looser than good free verse: by
Websterian verse, I mean that kind of blank verse which has
been so named in our time, the loose blank verse of the speeches
of Bosola, of Mr. T. S. Eliot's Gerontion, and of Mr. Archibald
MacLeish. In nearly all verse of this kind, the sense of the blank
verse norm is feeble; the substitution of feet becomes meaning-
less because there is so much of it; there is no care for the distri-
bution of secondary accents or lesser syllables; and there is no
basic regularity which can be made to support didactic or other
linking passages when they are necessary, for the Websterian
poet simply does not dare to revert over the long distance to
formal blank verse, for fear of destroying the cohesion of his
poem.

This last weakness means that necessary connecting links are
evaded, and the evasion has at least two consequences of its own:
first, the poetry, in so far as it needs logical linking, tends to
break down into lyrical fragments, as in The Waste Land? and,
second, the didacticism, not being properly accounted for, is
likely to edge into passages where it does not belong, and in a
fragmentary and unsatisfactory form, frequently in the evasive
and indeterminable form which I have described at length in
another essay under the name of pseudo-reference. This frag-
mentary didacticism is unsatisfactory, because the poems I have
in mind— The Waste Land, and Allen Tate's Causerie,™ and
Retroduction to American History11— are fundamentally exposi-

9 Poems 1909-25, by T. S. Eliot, Faber and Gwyon, London.

10 Poems 1928-31, by Allen Tate, Scribners, 1932.

11 Mr. Pope and Other Poems, by Allen Tate, Minton Balch, N. Y., 1928.

tory poems, akin to the expository poems of Pope and Dryden,
in that they endeavor to give a summary of a contemporary view
of life and a criticism of such a view.

To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating
form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a
sophistical justification of bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian
notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to "ex-
press" the loose and sprawling American continent. In fact, all
feeling, if one gives oneself (that is, one's form) up to it, is a
way of disintegration; poetic form is by definition a means to
arrest the disintegration and order the feeling; and in so far as
any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of
anything.

Mr. Tate's Causerie embodies social criticism and moral in-
dignation, two traditionally didactic-satiric themes:

The essential wreckage of your age is different,

The accident the same; the Annabella

Of proper incest, no longer incestuous;

In an age of abstract experience, fornication

Is self -expression, adjunct to Christian euphoria,

And whores become delinquents; delinquents, patients;

Patients, -wards of society. Whores, by that rule,

Are precious.

Was it for this that Lucius
Became the ass of Thessaly? For this did Kyd
Unlock the lion of passion on his stage?
To litter a race of politic pimps? To glut
The Capitol with the progeny of ostlers,
Where now the antique courtesy of your myths
Goes in to sleep under a still shadow?

Compared to any modern satirical or ironical verse, the passage
is vigorous; compared to the passage from Churchill, it wants
finish. Yet it is in a sense more serious than Churchill, for it has
144

wider implications and rests upon wider and more careful
thought.

The poet who has made the most ambitious attempt of our
century to create a carry-all form is Ezra Pound, but his free
verse, though the best of it is better meter than any of the neo-
Websterian verse, remains in spite of his efforts a lyrical instru-
ment which is improperly used for other than lyrical effects.

As in all free verse, and as in Websterian verse, we have in
Mr. Pound's verse no normal foot, nothing to take the place of
the couplet's basic regularity, no substructure insisting steadily on
the identity of the poem, regardless of whither it wander. The
meter, as in nearly all free verse, is wholly at one with the mood,
and if the mood undergoes a marked change, the whole poem
goes off with it and becomes incoherent. Purely didactic poetry is
impossible in the form, because of the chanting, emotional quality
of the rhythms, from which there is no escape, even momen-
tarily: the rhythm implies a limited lyrical mood.

Unlike the Websterians, Mr. Pound in his best Cantos does
not muddy his verse with secondary and uncontrolled didacti-
cism: he is usually didactic, if at all, by implication only, but im-
plication is inadequate, in the long run, as a didactic instrument.
In the best Cantos,12 at least, Mr. Pound is successful, whether in
fragments or on the whole, but he presents merely a psychologi-
cal progression or flux, the convention being sometimes that of
wandering revery, sometimes that of wandering conversation.
The range of such a convention is narrowly limited, not only as
regards formulable content, but as regards feeling. The feelings
attendant upon revery and amiable conversation tend to great
similarity notwithstanding the subject matter, and they simply
are not the most vigorous or important feelings of which the
human being is capable.

The method, when employed in satirical portraiture, lacks the
incisiveness of the eighteenth century masters:

So we left him at last in Chi'dsso
Along with the old w'dman from Kansas,

13 A Draft of Thirty Cantos, by Ezra Pound. Hours Press: Paris: 1932.

* S6lid Kansas, her daughter had married that Swiss
Who kept the Buffet in ChiZsso.

Did it shake her? It di'd not shake her.

She sat there in the waiting room, sdlid Kansas,

* Stiff as a cigar store Indian from the Bowery
Such as 6ne saw in the nineties,

First sod of bleeding Kansas

That had produced this ligneous solidness.

* If thou wilt go to Chiasso wilt find that indestructible female
As if waiting for the train to Top'eka.

The passage is amusing in a way, but is soft and diffuse. Even
The Rosciad affords more successful portraits. Notwithstanding
the concreteness of the material, the meter is already outside the
range in which it functions most effectively— the range, that is,
of the fourth or of the seventh Canto. The meter is naturally
elegiac, and the handling of it in such a passage as this is bound
to be arbitrary and insensitive: the secondary accents fall acci-
dentally, are.%hard to identify, and are neither perceptive nor
intrinsically pleasing as sound, and so little attention is paid to
shadings of quantity as to render the passage very awkward of
movement. These defects in general are the defects of Mr.
Pound's style, though in many passages they are far less evident
than here. Like Swinburne, he has acquired an undeserved repu-
tation for metrical mastery, largely as a result of a fairly suave
manipulation of certain insistently recurring mannerisms, which,
to the half-trained or the half-alert, appear signs of finish and
control rather than what they are, the signs of a measure of in-
certitude and of insensitivity.

Mr. Pound has come no closer than Mr. Tate to creating a
carry-all meter, but in his efforts he has sometimes created a purer
poetry than has Mr. Tate while indulging in strictly similar
efforts, chiefly, perhaps, because Mr. Pound has not been aware
of comparably difficult material.

The Testament of Beauty, by Robert Bridges, offers one other
experiment toward a carry-all form, which I should like, but am
unable, to admire. The form is unrhymed duodecasyllabics, de-
146

pendent for their existence as such upon a definite and reason-
ably workable system of elision, a form which Bridges calls
syllabic hexameter or Alexandrin verse. The form, as I under-
stand it, evolved roughly in this fashion: through Bridges' failure
to recognize the principle of varying accent and the law of the
identification of accent, as I gave them early in this essay, Bridges
came to regard standard English verse as fundamentally syllabic,
but hampered by certain other half -observed rules; the details of

this notion he worked out in his metrical studv entitled Milton's

j

Prosody. In Samson Agonistes, he found certain twelve-syllable
lines, which in nearly every case I should be inclined to read as
violent aberrations from iambic pentameter, but which Bridges,
since he had a predisposition in favor of the syllable-count as the
basis of the measure, read as Alexandrins. On the basis of these
violent and impassioned lines, lines whose metrical force, as far
as I can feel them, resides in a terrible struggle with the iambic
pentameter norm, a struggle comparable at moments to the
struggle of Samson with the pillars, save that in this instance the
pillars do not, I believe, quite yield, Bridges constructed an un-
rhymed syllabic hexameter, in which the accents follow no law
save that of variation, and employed it in a long expository poem
conceived, like most didactic poetry, at a low and calm level of
feeling. The Miltonic struggle was eliminated, and had it re-
mained it would have been highly improper in conjunction with
the subject-matter; but so also was the Miltonic form eliminated.
The meter suffers from one of the two basic defects of free verse:
there is not, as there is in free verse, a limit to the variability of
accent, but there is, as in free verse, no norm as the basis of varia-
tion, so that syllables within the line are loose and shuffling,
though usually, by means of a little arbitrary classification one
can scan the lines accentually. The result is a meter as invariably
monotonous as that of Orm, and the reason for the monotony is
the same : regardless whether one attempts to scan the line accen-
tually, or whether one follows Bridges and scans it syllabically
(by all odds the preferable procedure), it successfully avoids the
accentual-syllabic, avoids, that is, any pattern or norm underlying
every syllable, so that, though one has constant change of move-

'47

ment from moment to moment, one has no variation, no precision
of intention. It has certain advantages, possibly, for the purpose
to which it is put in the Testament of Beauty over the heavily
accented meter of Pound: its very monotony gives it a certain
coherence, the coherence, however, merely of undefined inten-
tion, yet its freedom from the constant recurrence of the heavy
measuring accent does not commit it so closely to a particular
range of feeling; but if Pound's best Cantos, the first six or seven,
are considered, the meter of Bridges is far less interesting in itself.
This is curious, for Bridges, in general, is incomparably the better
poet and the better metrist.

Bridges* syllables, as employed by himself and by his daughter,
Elizabeth Daryush, resemble free verse in certain other respects:
they are more amenable to treatment if rhymed than if un-
rhymed, just as the double-accentual poems of Hopkins are firmer
metrically than any of the unrhymed free verse of the Ameri-
cans; and they are more likely to succeed in a short poem than in
a long, for in the former the possibilities inherent in the various
dispositions of Accent can be more or less nearly exhausted with-
out being repeated. Mrs. Daryush has been more successful, in
my estimation, in writing syllabics, than was her father, though
her greatest work, like that of her father, has been in the tradi-
tional meters. The following sonnet, entitled Still-Life, is one of
her finest syllabic experiments:

Through the open French window the warm sun
lights up the polished breakfast-table, laid
round a bowl of crimson roses, for one—
a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayed
near it a melon, peaches, figs, small hot
rolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast,
butter in ice, high silver coffee-pot,
and, heaped on a salver, the mornings post.
She comes over the lawn, the young heiress,
from her early walk in her garden-wood,
feeling that life's a table set to bless
her delicate desires with all that's good,
148

that even the unopened future lies
like a love-letter, full of sweet surprise.

One imagines that the medium could not be used with greater
beauty than in this poem; there is certainly nothing in the work
of the American masters of free verse to surpass it, and there is
little to equal it. Yet like the best free verse, it lacks the final
precision and power, the flexibility of suggestion, of the best
work in accentual-syllabics, in which every syllable stands in
relationship to a definite norm.

But I must now summarize my position in general terms. The
sum total of the metrical virtues is necessary to didactic verse or
to any sort of long poem, and is a profound advantage even to the
shortest lyric. The sum total may be described briefly as follows:
coherence of movement, variety of movement, and fine percep-
tivity. These virtues can occur in conjunction only in a system in
which every detail is accounted for. That is, if the system is based
(as English verse is normally based) on accent, then every syl-
lable must be recognizably in or out of place whether stressed or
not, and if out of place in a classifiable way; the degree of accent
must vary perceptibly though immeasurably from a perceptible
though immeasurable norm; quantity should be used consciously
to qualify these conditions; in brief, the full sound-value of every
syllable must be willed for a particular end, and must be precise
in the attainment of that end. As language has other values than
those of sound, this ideal will be always forced into some measure
of compromise with the other values; nevertheless, the essence of
art, I take it, is that no compromise should be very marked, and the
perfection of art, though rare and difficult, is not unattainable. In
a system such as English syllabics, or as free verse, most or all of
the individual syllables can have no definite relationship to the
pattern; so that there is no exact basis for judging them, and they
are, when chosen, relatively without meaning.

Traditional meter, then, like the other aspects of traditional
convention which I have discussed in other essays, tends to ex-
ploit the full possibilities of language; experimental meter, like
other aspects of experimental convention, is incomplete. To push

149

the analogy farther, experimental conventions in general tend to
abandon comprehensible motive, to resort to unguided feeling;
similarly experimental meter loses the rational frame which alone
gives its variations the precision of true perception. Or to put it
another way: as traditional poetry in general aims to adjust feel-
ing rightly to motive, it needs the most precise instrument pos-
sible for the rendering of feeling, and so far as meter is concerned,
this instrument will be traditional meter. Further, as traditional
poetry tends to enrich itself with past wisdom, with an acquired
sense of what is just, so the traditional meters, owing to their very
subtle adjustibility and suggestibility, are frequently very com-
plex in their effects, whereas the looser meters tend to be over-
emphatic and over-simple.

It will be seen that what I desire of a poem is a clear under-
standing of motive, and a just evaluation of feeling; the justice
of the evaluation persisting even into the sound of the least im-
portant syllable. Such a poem is a perfect and complete act of the
spirit; it calls upon the full life of the spirit; it is difficult of at-
tainment, but I am aware of no good reason to be contented with
less.

150

Maule's Curse

SEVEN STUDIES IN THE

HISTORY OF
AMERICAN OBSCURANTISM

FOREWORD

DURING THE YEAR 1937, 1 published through the Arrow Editions
in New York City a volume of criticism entitled Primitivism and
Decadence; this book is a study of the technical forms taken by
American Experimental Poetry during the twentieth century-
it is a study very largely of the forms of unconscious and of con-
scious obscurantism which are the ultimate development of Ro-
mantic aesthetic principles qualified to a greater or smaller extent
by certain aspects of American history. Had I required any fur-
ther proof of the essential confusion of the literary mind of our
period, the reception met by this book would have more than
satisfied me. Its contents were described with placid and painstak-
ing inaccuracy by many reviewers, with bitterly excited inaccu-
racy by others; it was attacked for opinions which it did not main-
tain or even suggest. But above all, it was attacked because it
pointed to the dangers inherent in obscurantism, and because it
found obscurity where the reviewer found none.

The subject of my reception by certain reviewers is not one of
great general interest, but one series of incidents in connection
with these reviews perhaps transcends that subject and has a cer-
tain theoretic interest. In discussing a passage quoted from the
opening of Hart Craned poem, For the Marriage of Faustus and
Helen, I complained of the obscurity of the lines beginning,
"Numbers rebuffed by asphalt/' and said that the numbers might
refer to numbers of people or to the mathematical abstractions of
modern life, but that either interpretation left the passage imper-
fectly comprehensible. Now I was wrong, and in justice to
Crane, I ought to correct the error. The numbers in question re-

'53

fer to the sparrows' wings in the preceding line, and by extension,
to the sparrows, and with this understanding the passage is per-
fectly clear. Crane is in a good measure to blame for the difficulty,
for the grammatical reference here and throughout the poem is
of the loosest, and as one of my reviewers, to whom I shall refer
in a moment, pointed out, there are elements in the passage that
actively support the second interpretation and that would no
doubt be a sufficient justification of the second interpretation if
that interpretation clarified the passage within itself. My error
does not, I believe, invalidate my general criticism of Crane, for
the type of obscurity which I mistakenly found in this passage
is certainly to be found elsewhere in Crane, though commonly in
shorter fragments, and I see no reason to believe that I was mis-
taken in regard to other passages which I found obscure.

So much, however, for justice to Crane and to myself; it is
something else that concerns me primarily. A well-known re-
viewer for a certain journal of advanced political and economic
theory, who attacked my book, or rather who attacked me per-
sonally, in terms the most irresponsible and scurrilous, and who
even ventured* to accuse me of insanity because I objected up to
a certain point to incoherent poetry, stated in private to one of
my friends, Mr. Don Stanford, that the numbers in question
were numbers of people, and that the passage was perfectly clear;
he did not, however, risk any interpretation of this passage or of
any other in print, and thus displayed a caution common to prac-
tically all of my critics. On the other hand, a more friendly re-
viewer, in the Southern Review, displayed something of my own
naivet£, and exposed himself lamentably. He asserted that this
passage was sufficiently clear, and that the numbers were the
mathematical abstractions of modern life, and that the lines a
little preceding, which deal with baseball scores, stock quotations,
and similar items support this interpretation; and that they do
support the interpretation I believe to be true, but they do not
clarify it. He then rather curiously and not quite coherently
added a defense of the kind of obscurity to be found in this pas-
sage.' The defense in itself was ingenious and admirable; it was
borrowed without acknowledgment from the last three pages of

'54

the third essay in my book under review, pages in which the
reader who is curious may find likewise an even more valuable
answer to the defense.

But here were two writers who found the passage clear enough
for each of them, and who were even a trifle contemptuous about
the whole matter, yet who disagreed with each other as to what
the passage meant. One of them must be wrong, and if the disin-
terested reader will consider the passage in the light of the new
interpretation which I have offered, I think he will agree that
both are wrong. The passage, then, is unquestionably on record
as exactly the sort of obscurantism which I asserted it to repre-
sent, although it is not Crane, in this particular passage, who is
guilty, but two of his admirers. Crane obviously will gain little
from the sort of defense which they offered him, nor will litera-
ture in general profit from the state of mind which led to it.

The present volume is an attempt to trace some of the earlier
aspects of this state of mind in America, to suggest at least a part
of the outline of a history of this state of mind. In so far as this
history is merely a history of the international romantic move-
ment, it is probably fairly well understood, at least in general
terms; in so far as it is merely a history of American religious and
other ideas and attitudes, it has been well treated by other writers,
to many of whom I shall refer in the essays to follow. The re-
lationship of the history of ideas to the history of literary forms,
however, or conversely, the intellectual and moral significance of
literary forms, has not been adequately studied; yet this subject
is the very core of literary criticism and of the understanding of
the history of literature. In my previous book, I described and
endeavored to evaluate forms, primarily, and used writers merely
to illustrate them. In the present volume I have examined indi-
vidual writers, a procedure which enables me to examine subject
matter more fully and to relate subject matter more fully to form.

Stanford University, 1938

155

MAULE'S CURSE
or Hawthorne and the Problem of Allegory

"At the moment of execution— with the halter about his neck and
while Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback, grimly gazing at the
scene— Maule had addressed him from the scaffold, and uttered a
prophecy, of which history as well as fireside tradition, has preserved
the very words. 'God/ said the dying man, pointing his finger, with
a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy, 'God
will give him blood to drink!' "

—The House of the Seven Gables

OF HAWTHORNE'S THREE most important long works— The Scar-
let Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Marble
Faun— the first is pure allegory, and the other two are impure
novels, or novels with unassimilated allegorical elements. The
first is faultless, in scheme and in detail; it is one of the chief
masterpieces of English prose. The second and third are interest-
ing, the third in particular, but both are failures, and neither
would suffice to give the author a very high place in the history
of prose fiction. Hawthorne's sketches and short stories, at best,
are slight performances; either they lack meaning, as in the case
of Mr. Higginbothams Catastrophe, or they lack reality of em-
bodiment, as in the case of The Birthmark, or, having a measure
of both, as does The Minister's Black Veil, they yet seem incapa-
ble of justifying the intensity of the method, their very brevity
and attendant simplification, perhaps, working against them; the
best of them, probably, is Young Goodman Brown. In his later
romances, Septimius Felton,. Dr. Grimshaw's Secret, The Ances-
tral Footstep, and The Dolliver Romance, and in much of The
Blithedale Romance as well, Hawthorne struggles unsuccessfully
with the problem of allegory, but he is still obsessed with it.
Hawthorne is, then, essentially an allegorist; had he followed

157

the advice of Poe and other well-wishers, contemporary with him-
self and posthumous, and thrown his allegorizing out the window,
it is certain that nothing essential to his genius would have re-
mained. He appears to have had none of the personal qualifica-
tions of a novelist, for one thing: the sombre youth who lived in
solitude and in contemplation in Salem, for a dozen years or
more, before succumbing to the charms and propinquity of Miss
Sophia Peabody and making the spasmodic and only moderately
successful efforts to accustom himself to daylight which were to
vex the remainder of his life, was one far more likely to concern
himself with the theory of mankind than with the chaos, trivial,
brutal, and exhausting, of the actuality. Furthermore, as we shall
see more fully, the Puritan view of life was allegorical, and the
allegorical vision seems to have been strongly impressed upon
the New England literary mind. It is fairly obvious in much of the
poetry of Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Byrant, Holmes, and even
Very— Whittier, a Quaker and a peasant, alone of the more inter-
esting poets escaping; Melville, relatively an outsider, shows the
impact of New England upon his own genius as much through
his use of allegory as through his use of New England character;
and the only important novelist purely a New Englander, aside
from Hawthorne, that is, O. W. Holmes, was primarily con-
cerned with the Puritan tendency to allegory, as its one consider
able satirist, yet was himself more or less addicted to it.

These matters are speculative. That New England predisposed
Hawthorne to allegory cannot be shown; yet the disposition in
both is obvious. And it can easily be shown that New England
provided the perfect material for one great allegory, and that, in
all likelihood, she was largely to blame for the later failures.

The Puritan theology rested primarily upon the doctrine of
predestination and the inefficaciousness of good works; it sepa-
rated men sharply and certainly into two groups, the saved and
the damned, and, technically, at least, was not concerned with
any subtler shadings. This in itself represents a long step toward
the allegorization of experience, for a very broad abstraction is
substituted for the patient study of the minutiae of moral be-
havior long encouraged by Catholic tradition. Another step was

necessary, however, and this step was taken in Massachusetts al-
most at the beginning of the settlement, and in the expulsion of
Anne Hutchinson became the basis of governmental action:
whereas the wholly Calvinistic Puritan denied the value of the
evidence of character and behavior as signs of salvation, and so
precluded the possibility of their becoming allegorical symbols—
for the orthodox Calvinist, such as Mrs. Hutchinson would
appear to have been, trusted to no witness save that of the Inner
Light— it became customary in Massachusetts to regard as evi-
dence of salvation the decision of the individual to enter the
Church and lead a moral life. 'The Puritans/' says Parkes, "were
plain blunt men with little taste for mysticism and no talent for
speculation. A new conception was formulated by English theo-
logians, of whom William Ames was the most influential. The
sign of election was not an inner assurance; it was a sober de-
cision to trust in Christ and obey God's law. Those who made
this sober decision might feel reasonably confident that they had
received God's grace; but the surest proof of it was its fruit in con-
duct; complete assurance was impossible. It was assumed that all
was the work of grace; it was God, without human cooperation,
who caused the sober decision to be made. But in actual practice
this doctrine had the effect of unduly magnifying man's ability to
save himself, as much as Calvin's conception had unduly mini-
mized it; conversion was merely a choice to obey a certain code of
rules, and did not imply any emotional change, any love for God,
or for holiness, or any genuine religious experience; religion in
other words was reduced to mere morality." l Objective evidence
thus took the place of inner assurance, and the behavior of the
individual took on symbolic value. That is, any sin was evidence
of damnation; or, in other words, any sin represented all sin.
When Hester Prynne committed adultery, she committed an act
as purely representative of complete corruption as the act of Faus-
tus in signing a contract with Satan. This view of the matter is
certainly not Catholic and is little short of appalling; it derives

1 The Puritan Heresy, by H. B. Parkes, The Hound and Horn V-2, Jan.-
March 1932, pages 173-4. See also The Pragmatic Test by H. B. Parkes, The
Colt Press, San Francisco,

from the fact, that although, as Parkes states in the passage just
quoted, there occurred an exaggeration of the will in the matter
of practical existence, this same will was still denied in the mat-
ter of doctrine, for according to doctrine that which man willed
had been previously willed by God.

The belief that the judgment of a man is predestined by God,
and the corollary that the judgment of a good man, since all men
are either good or bad, purely and simply, is the judgment of
God, may lead in the natural course of events to extraordinary
drama; and this the more readily if the actors in the drama are
isolated from the rest of the world and believe that the drama in
which they take part is of cosmic importance and central in hu-
man destiny. Andrews writes: "The belief that God had selected
New England as the chosen land was profoundly held by the
Puritans who went there. Winthrop himself in 1640 wrote to
Lord Saye and Sele of 'this good land which God hath found
and given to his people/ adding that 'God had chosen this coun-
try to plant his people in/ Cotton in his sermon, God's Prom-
ise to His Plantation (London, 1634), devotes much space to
the same idea— This place is appointed me of God/ " 2 And
Schneider writes on the same subject: "No one can live long in a
Holy Commonwealth without becoming sensitive, irritable, los-
ing his sense of values and ultimately his balance. All acts are
acts either of God or of the devil; all issues are matters of reli-
gious faith; and all conflicts are holy wars. No matter how trivial
an opinion might appear from a secular point of view, it be-
came vital when promulgated as a theological dogma; no matter
how harmless a fool might be, he was intolerable if he did not
fit into the Covenant of Grace; no matter how slight an offense
might be, it was a sin against Almighty God and hence infinite.
Differences of opinion became differences of faith. Critics be-
came blasphemers, and innovators, heretics/'8 And again: ". . .
the mind of the Puritan was singularly unified and his imagina-
tion thoroughly moralized. The clergy were, of course, the pro-

1 The Colonial Period of American History, by Charles M. Andrews; Yale

niversity Press, 1934. Vol. I, page 386, note 2.

3 The Puritan Mind, by H. W. Schneider; Henry Holt, 1930, pages 51-2.

fessional moral scientists, but the laymen were no less dominated
by such mental habits. The common man and illiterate shared
with the expert this interest in divining God's purposes in the
course of events. No event was merely natural; it was an act of
God and was hence charged with that 'numinous' quality which
gives birth to both prophetic insight and mystic illumination." 4
And again: "Nature was instructive to them only in so far as it
suggested the hidden mysterious operations of designing agents.
God and devil were both active, scheming, hidden powers, each
pursuing his own ends by various ministrations, and natural
events were therefore to be understood only in so far as they
showed evidence of some divine or diabolical plot." 5

Now according to the doctrine of predestination, if we inter-
pret it reasonably, Hester merely gave evidence, in committing
adultery, that she had always been one of the damned. This
point of view, if really understood, could never have led to the
chain of events which Hawthorne described in The Scarlet
Letter; neither could it have led to the events of the actual his-
tory of New England. It is at this point that we must consider
that fluid element, history, in connection with dogma, for Hester,
like the witches who so occupied the Mathers, was treated as if
she had wilfully abandoned the ways of God for the ways of
Satan. This final illogicality introduces the element of drama
into the allegory of The Scarlet Letter and into the allegorical
morality of the Puritans.

The English Puritans who settled Massachusetts were socially
the product of centuries of the type of ethical discipline fostered
by the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic Churches. They may have
denied the freedom of the will and the efficaciousness of good
works by lip, but by habit, and without really grasping the fact,
they believed in them and acted upon them. Edwards exhorts
sinners to repent while preaching the doctrine of the inability
to repent; the Mathers wrestled with demons physically and in
broad daylight, and quite obviously felt virtuous for having done
so; in fact, to such a pass did Puritanism come, that Melville's
Ahab, who wilfully embarks upon the Sea of Unpredictability

* Ibid., page 48. 5 Ibid., pages 42-3.

161

in order to overtake and slay the Spirit of Evil— an effort in
which he is predestined and at the end of which he is pre-
destined to destruction— appears to us merely the heroic projec-
tion of a common Puritan type. The Puritan may be said to have
conceived the Manicheistic struggle between Absolute Good and
Absolute Evil, which he derived through the processes of simpli-
fication and misunderstanding which have already been enumer-
ated, as a kind of preordained or mechanical, yet also holy combat,
in which his own part was a part at once intense and holy and yet
immutably regulated.

There were at least two motives in the new environment which
tended to intensify the effect of habit in this connection : one was
the inevitable impulse given to the will by the exaltation attend-
ant upon a new religious movement; the other was the impulse
given by the supremely difficult physical surroundings in which
the new colonies found themselves. Foster writes on these points:
"The first Puritans, sure in their own hearts that they were the
elect of God, found the doctrine necessary to sustain them in the
tremendous ^struggle through which they passed. . . . Hence
the doctrine nerved to greater activity; and it produced a similar
effect during the first period of the promulgation of Calvinism,
among every nation which accepted the system/' 6 The force of
the will was strengthened at the beginning, then, at the same
time that its existence was denied and that reliance upon its
manner of functioning (that is, upon good works) was, from a
doctrinal standpoint, regarded as sin. The will, highly stimulated,
but no longer studied and guided by the flexible and sensitive
ethical scholarship of the Roman tradition, might easily result
in dangerous action.

Andrews speaks of this subject as follows: "The dynamic
agency . . . the driving force which overrode all opposition,
legal and otherwise, was the profound conviction of the Puritan
leaders that they were doing the Lord's work. They looked upon
themselves as instruments in the divine hand for the carrying out
of a great religious mission, the object of which was the rebuild-

e A Genetic History of the New England Theology, by Frank Hugh Foster;
University of Chicago Press, 1907; page 29.

ing of God's church in a land— the undefiled land of America—
divinely set apart as the scene of a holy experiment that should
renovate the church at large, everywhere corrupt and falling into
ruins. This new and purified community was to be the home of a
saving remnant delivered from the wrath to come and was to
serve as an example to the mother church of a regenerated form
of faith and worship. It was also to become a proselyting center
for the conversion of the heathen and the extension of the true
gospel among those who knew it not. In the fulfillment of this
mission the Puritans counted obstacles, moral and physical, of
no moment. Theirs was a religious duty to frustrate their ene-
mies, to eradicate all inimical opinions, religious and political,
and to extend the field of their influence as widely as possible.
Once they had determined on their rules of polity and conduct,
as laid down in the Bible and interpreted by the clergy, they had
no doubts of the justness and Tightness of their course. The
means employed might savor of harshness and inequity, but at all
costs and under all circumstances, error, sin, and idolatry, in
whatever form appearing and as determined by themselves, must
be destroyed. In the process, as events were to prove, a great many
very human motives played an important part in interpreting the
law of God, and personal likes and dislikes, hypocrisy, prejudice,
and passion got badly mixed with the higher and more spiritual
impulses that were actively at work purging the church of its

» 7

errors.

Over a long period, however, the doctrine of predestination
would naturally lead to religious apathy, for it offered no explicit
motive to action; and this is precisely that to which it led, for
after the Great Awakening of the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury, itself a reaction to previous decay in the Church, the Church
lost power rapidly, and by the opening of the nineteenth century
was succumbing on every hand to Unitarianism, a mildly mor-
alistic creed, in which the element of supernaturalism was mini-
mized, and which, in turn, yielded rapidly among the relatively
intellectual classes to Romantic ethical theory, especially as pro-
pounded by the Transcendentalists. "It has never been a good

7 Charles M. Andrews, op. cit., Vol. I, pages 430-1.

163

way to induce men to repent/1 says Foster, "to tell them that they
cannot/' 8 Or at least the method has never been highly success-
ful except when employed by a rhetorician of the power of
Edwards, or by an orator of the effectiveness of Whitefield; and
the effect can scarcely be expected long to outlive the immediate
presence of the speaker. The Unitarians, in depriving the ethical
life of the more impressive aspects of its supernatural sanction,
and in offering nothing to take the place of that sanction, all but
extinguished intensity of moral conviction, although their own
conviction— we may see it portrayed, for example, in The Euro-
peans, by Henry James, and exemplified in the lucid and classical
prose of W. E. Channing— was a conviction, at least for a period,
of the greatest firmness and dignity. Emerson eliminated the need
of moral conviction and of moral understanding alike, by promul-
gating the allied doctrines of equivalence and of inevitable virtue.
In an Emersonian universe there is equally no need and no pos-
sibility of judgment; it is a universe of amiable but of perfectly
unconscious imbeciles; it is likewise a universe in which the art
of the fictionist— or for that matter, any other art— can scarcely be
expected to flourish. A fictionist who has been in any consider-
able measure affected by Emersonian or allied concepts, or even
who is the product of the historical sequence which gave rise to
Emerson, is likely to find himself gravely confused and may even
find himself paralyzed; and we have only to read such a docu-
ment, to cite a single example, as The New Adam and Eve, to
realize that Hawthorne's own moral ideas, in spite of his intense
but conflicting moral sentiments, and in spite of his professed dis-
like for Emerson's philosophy, were much closer to the ideas of
Emerson than to those of Edwards.

Now in examining Hawthorne, we are concerned with two
historical centers: that of the first generation of Puritans in New
England, in which occurs the action of The Scarlet Letter; and
that of the post-Unitarian and Romantic intellectuals, in which
was passed the life of Hawthorne.

Hawthorne, by nature an allegorist, and a man with a strong
moral instinct, regardless of the condition of his ideas, found in

8 Frank Hugh Foster, op. cit., page 29.
164

the early history of his own people and region the perfect ma-
terial for a masterpiece. By selecting sexual sin as the type of all
sin, he was true alike to the exigencies of drama and of history. In
the setting which he chose, allegory was realism, the idea was life
itself; and his prose, always remarkable for its polish and flexi-
bility, and stripped, for once, of all superfluity, was reduced to
the living idea, it intensified pure exposition to a quality compar-
able in its way to that of great poetry.

The compactness and complexity of the allegory will escape
all save the most watchful readers. Let us consider the follow-
ing passage as a representative example. Hester has learned that
the magistrates and clergy are considering whether or not she
ought to be separated from her child, and she waits upon Gov-
ernor Bellingham in order to plead with him:

"On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the fore-
fathers of the Bellingham lineage, some with armor on their
breasts, and others with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were
characterized by the sternness and severity which old portraits so
invariably put on; as if they were the ghosts, rather than the pic-
tures, of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh and in-
tolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men.

"At about the center of the oaken panels, that lined the hall,
was suspended a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral
relic, but of the most modern date; for it had been manufactured
by a skillful armorer in London, the same year in which Gover-
nor Bellingham came over to New England. There was a steel
head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget, and greaves, with a pair of gaunt-
lets and a sword hanging beneath; all, especially the helmet and
breast-plate, so highly burnished as to glow with white radiance,
and scatter an illumination everywhere about the floor. This
bright panoply was not meant for mere idle show, but had been
worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training
field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in
the Pequot war. For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to
speak of Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch as his professional asso-
ciates, the exigencies of this new country had transformed Gov-
ernor Bellingham into a soldier as well as a statesman and ruler.

"Little Pearl— who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming
armor as she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the
house—spent some time looking into the polished mirror of the
breast-plate.

" 'Mother/ cried she, 1 see you here. Look! Look!'

"Hester looked, by way of humoring the child; and she saw
that, owing to the peculiar effect of the convex mirror, the scarlet
letter was represented in gigantic and exaggerated proportions,
so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance.
In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl pointed
upward, also, at a similar picture in the head-piece; smiling at her
mother with the elfish intelligence that was so familiar an expres-
sion on her small physiognomy. That look of naughty merriment
was likewise reflected in the mirror, with so much breadth and
intensity of effect, that it made Hester Prynne feel as if it could
not be the image of her own child, but of an imp who was seek-
ing to mold itself into Pearl's shape."

The portraits are obviously intended as an apology for the
static portraits in the book, as an illustration of the principle of
simplification By distance and by generalization; the new armor,
on the other hand, is the new faith which brought the Puritans
to New England, and which not only shone with piety— "espe-
cially the helmet and breast-plate," the covering of the head and
heart— but supported them in their practical struggles with phys-
ical adversaries, and which in addition altered their view of the
life about them to dogmatic essentials, so that Hester was oblit-
erated behind the fact of her sin, and Pearl transformed in view
of her origin. Governor Bellingham, in his combination of legal
training with military prowess, is representative of his fellow
colonists, who displayed in a remarkable degree a capacity to act
with great strength and with absolutely simple directness upon
principles so generalized as scarcely to be applicable to any par-
ticular moral problem, which mastered moral difficulties not by
understanding them, but by crushing them out.

Historically and relatively considered, Richard Bellingham
might conceivably have been spared this function in the story,
for of his group he was one of the two or three most humane and
166

liberal; but the qualities represented were the qualities of the
group of .which he was a leader, and were extremely evident in
most of the actions of the colony. Perhaps the best— or in an-
other sense, the worst— embodiment of these qualities is to be
found in John Endecott, of whom Andrews gives the following
characterization: "Endecott had few lovable qualities. He was
stern, unyielding, and on some subjects a zealot. Johnson apos-
trophizes him as 'strong, valiant John/ whom Christ had called
to be his soldier, but the Old Planters, most if not all of whom
were Anglicans and demanded service according to the Book of
Common Prayer, deemed themselves slaves and took in very bad
part his determination to suppress the Church of England in the
colony. They preferred Roger Conant, who though a less forcible
man was one much easier to get along with. Endecott's later
career discloses his attitude toward those who differed with him
—the heathen Indian, the Quaker, the prisoner before him for
judgment, and the Brownes and other upholders of the Anglican
service who were disaffected with the Puritan government. It
also shows his dislike of forms and devices that offended him—
the Book of Common Prayer, the cross of St. George, and the
Maypole. He was hard, intolerant, and at times cruel. Even the
Massachusetts government caused him 'to be sadly admonished
for his offense' in mutilating the flag at Salem in 1635, charging
him with 'rashness, uncharitableness, indiscretion, and exceeding
the limits of his calling'; and again in the same year 'committed'
him for losing his temper. Endecott once apologized to Winthrop
for striking 'goodman Dexter,' acknowledging that he was rash,
but saying that Dexter's conduct 'would have provoked a very
patient man.' The best that can be said of him has been said by
Chappie ('The Public Service of John Endecott,' Historical Col-
lections, Essex Institute), an essay in the best Palfrey manner.
It is odd that Endecott should have chosen for his seal a skull and
cross-bones." 9 It is interesting to observe in such a passage, as in
many others, that the Puritans cannot be discussed, nor can they
discuss each other, without the language employed exceeding the
limits proper to predestinarians and invoking the traditional mo-
* Charles M. Andrews, op. cit., Vol. I, page 361, note 3.

167

rality of the older churches; yet the attempt to ignore this tradi-
tional morality as far as might be, and, in the matter of formal
doctrine, to repudiate it, unquestionably had much to do with
the formation of such characters as Professor Andrews here de-
scribes and as Hawthorne in the last passage quoted from him
symbolizes. The imperceptive, unwavering brutality of many of
the actions committed in the name of piety in the Massachusetts
colonies more than justified the curse and prophecy uttered by
Matthew Maule, that God would give these Puritans blood to
drink; in the name of God, they had violently cut themselves off
from human nature; in the end, that is in Hawthorne's genera-
tion and in the generation following, more than one of them
drank his own heart's blood, as Hawthorne himself must have
done in his ultimate and frustrated solitude, and more than one
of them shed it.

It is noteworthy that in this passage from The Scarlet Letter
Hawthorne turns his instrument of allegory, the gift of the Puri-
tans, against the Puritans themselves, in order to indicate the
limits of their intelligence; it is noteworthy also that this act of
criticism, though both clear and sound, is negative, that he no-
where except in the very general notion of regeneration through
repentance establishes the nature of the intelligence which might
exceed the intelligence of the Puritans, but rather hints at the
ideal existence of a richer and more detailed understanding than
the Puritan scheme of life is able to contain. The strength of The
Scarlet Letter is in part safe-guarded by the refusal to explore this
understanding; the man who was able in the same lifetime to
write The New Adam and Eve, to conceive the art-colony de-
scribed in The Marble Faun, and to be shocked at the nude
statues of antiquity, was scarcely the man to cast a clear and
steady light upon the finer details of the soul.

The conception of the book in general is as cleanly allegorical
as is the conception of the passage quoted. Hester represents the
repentant sinner, Dimmesdale the half-repentant sinner, and
Chillingworth the unrepentant sinner. The fact that Chilling-
worth's sin is the passion for revenge is significant only to the
extent that this is perhaps the one passion which most completely
1 68

isolates man from normal human sympathies and which there-
fore is most properly used to represent an unregenerate condition.

The method of allegorization is that of the Puritans them-
selves; the substance of the allegory remained in a crude form a
part of their practical Christianity in spite of their Calvinism,
just as it remained in their non-theological linguistic forms, just
as we can see it in the language of the best poems of so purely
and mystically Calvinistic a writer as Jones Very, a living lan-
guage related to a living experience, but overflowing the limits
of Calvinistic dogma; Hawthorne's point of view was naturally
more enlightened than that of the Puritans themselves, yet it was
insufficiently so to enable him to recover the traditional Chris-
tian ethics except in the most general terms and by way of his-
torical sympathy, for had a more complete recovery been possible,
he would not have been so narrowly bound to the method of
allegory and the frustration of the later romances would scarcely
have been so complete.

Once Hawthorne had reduced the problem of sin to terms as
general as these, and had brought his allegory to perfect literary
form, he had, properly speaking, dealt with sin once and for
all; there was nothing further to be said about it. It would not
serve to write another allegory with a new set of characters and
a different sin as the motive; for the particular sin is not par-
ticular in function, but is merely representative of sin in general,
as the characters, whatever their names and conditions may be,
are merely representative of the major stages of sin— there is no
escape from the generality so long as one adheres to the method.
There was nothing further, then, to be done in this direction,
save the composition of a few footnotes to the subject in the form
of sketches.

The only alternative remaining was to move away from the
allegorical extreme of narrative toward the specific, that is, to-
ward the art of the novelist. The attempt was made, but fell
short of success. In The House of the Seven Gables and in The
Marble Faun alike the moral understanding of the action— and
there is a serious attempt at such understanding, at least in The
Marble Faun— is corrupted by a provincial sentimentalism ethi-

169

cally far inferior to the Manicheism of the Puritans, which was
plain and comprehensive, however brutal. And Hawthorne had
small gift for the creation of human beings, a defect allied to
his other defects and virtues: even the figures in The Scarlet
Letter are unsatisfactory if one comes to the book expecting to
find a novel, for they draw their life not from simple and fa-
miliar human characteristics, as do the figures of Henry James,
but from the precision and intensity with which they render
their respective ideas; the very development of the story is neither
narrative nor dramatic, but expository. When, as in The Marble
faun or The House of the Seven Gables, there is no idea gov-
erning the human figure, or when the idea is an incomplete
or unsatisfactory equivalent of the figure, the figure is likely to
be a disappointing spectacle, for he is seldom if ever a convincing
human being and is likely to verge on the ludicrous. Hawthorne
had not the rich and profound awareness of immediacy which
might have saved a writer such as Melville in a similar pre-
dicament.

His effort to master the novelist's procedure, however, was not
sustained, for his heart was not in it. In The Blithedale Romance,
he began as a novelist, but lost himself toward the close in an
unsuccessful effort to achieve allegory; the four unfinished ro-
mances represent similar efforts throughout.

His procedure in the last works was startlingly simple; so
much so, that no one whom 1 can recollect has run the risk of
defining it.

In The Scarlet Letter there occurs a formula which one might
name the formula of alternative possibilities. In the ninth chap-
ter, for example, there occurs the following passage: "The peo-
ple, in the case of which we speak, could justify its prejudice
against Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy of
serious refutation. There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true,
who had been a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas
Overbury's murder, now some thirty years agone; he testified to
having seen the physician, under some other name, which the
narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Dr.
Forman, the famous old conjuror, who was implicated in the
170

affair of Overbury. Two or three individuals hinted, that the
man of skill, during his Indian captivity, had enlarged his med-
ical attainments by joining in the incantations of the savage
priests; who were universally acknowledged to be powerful en-
chanters, often performing seemingly miraculous cures by their
skill in the black art. A large number— many of them were per-
sons of such sober sense and practical observation that their
opinions would have been valuable in other matters— affirmed
that Roger Chillingworth's aspect had undergone a remarkable
change while he had dwelt in the town, and especially since his
abode with Dimmesdale. At first, his expression had been calm,
meditative, scholar-like. Now, there was something ugly and evil
in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and which
grew still more obvious to sight the oftener they looked upon
him. According to the vulgar idea, the fire in his laboratory had
been brought from the lower regions, and was fed with infernal
fuel; and so, as might be expected, his visage was getting sooty
with smoke/'

In such a passage as this, the idea conveyed is clear enough,
but the embodiment of the idea appears far-fetched, and Haw
thornc offers it whimsically and apologetically, professing to let
you take it or leave it. Another example occurs in the eighteenth
chapter; Dimmesdale and Hester are sitting in the forest, plan-
ning the flight which ultimately is never to take place, and
Pearl, the symbolic offspring of the untamed elements of human
nature, and hence akin to the forest, which, in the Puritan mind,
was ruled by Satan in person, plays apart: "A fox, startled from
his sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively
at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal off or renew
his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said— but here the talc
has surely lapsed into the improbable— came up and smelt of
PeaiTs robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her
hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest,
and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kin-
dred wildncss in the human child." Similarly, in The Marble
Fmw, one never learns whether Donatello had or had not the
pointed ears which serve throughout the book as the physical

171

symbol of his moral nature; the book ends with the question
being put to Kenyon, who has had opportunities to observe, and
with his refusing to reply.

This device, though it becomes a minor cause of irritation
through constant recurrence, is relatively harmless, and at times
is even used with good effect. If we reverse the formula, however,
so as to make the physical representation perfectly clear but the
meaning uncertain, we have a very serious situation; and this is
precisely what occurs, in some measure toward the close of The
Blithedale Romance, and without mitigation throughout the four
unfinished romances. We have in the last all of the machinery
and all of the mannerisms of the allegorist, but we cannot dis-
cover the substance of his communication, nor is he himself
aware of it so far as we can judge. We have the symbolic foot-
print, the symbolic spider, the symbolic elixirs and poisons, but
we have not that of which they are symbolic; we have the
hushed, the tense and confidential manner, on the part of the
narrator, of one who imparts a grave secret, but the words are
inaudible. Yet we have not, on the other hand, anything ap-
proaching realistic fiction, for the events are improbable or even
impossible, and the characters lack all reality. The technique
neither of the novelist nor of the allegorist was available to Haw-
thorne when he approached the conditions of his own experi-
ence: he had looked for signals in nature so long and so intently,
and his ancestors before him had done so for so many genera-
tions, that, like a man hypnotized, or like a man corroded with
madness, he saw them; but he no longer had any way of deter-
mining their significance, and he had small talent for rendering
their physical presence with intensity.

Percy Boynton,10 in quoting the following passages from Sep-
timius Felton, refers to it as a self-portrait: "As for Septimius,
let him alone a moment or two, and then they would see him,
with his head bent down, brooding, brooding, his eyes fixed on
some chip, some stone, some common plant, any commonest

10 Literature and American Life, by Percy H. Boynton; Ginn and Co., 1936;
page 518.

172

thing, as if it were the clew and index to some mystery; and
when, by chance startled out of these meditations, he lifted his
eyes, there would be a kind of perplexity, a dissatisfied, foiled
look in them, as if of his speculations he found no end/'

It is in this generation and the next that we see most clearly
and bitterly the realization of Maule's prophecy. These men were
cut off from their heritage, from their source of significance,
and were abnormally sensitive to the influence of European Ro-
manticism. In Emerson11 the terms of New England mysticism
and of Romantic amoralism were fused and confused so inex-
tricably that we have not yet worked ourselves free of them. In
Poe, a man born without a background, New England or any
other, Romantic doctrine was introduced directly, in a form free
of theological terminology, but in a form none the less which
would tend in the long run to support the influence of Emerson.
In Melville, the greatest man of his era and of his nation, we
find a writer superior at certain points in his career— in books
such as Moby Dick and Benito Cereno, for example— to the
confusion and apparently understanding it; at other points— in
books like Mardi and Pierre,— succumbing to the confusion; at
all points in his career made to suffer for the confusion of con-
temporary literary taste; and at the end, settling himself in si-
lence, a figure more difficult to face than the later Hawthorne-
more difficult, because more conscious, more controlled, and
more nearly indifferent.

In Henry Adams we see the curse at work most clearly: intel-
lectual but inconsecutive, unable to justify any principle of ac-
tion, yet with a character of the highest, a character which de-
manded not only just action but its justification, he was damned
to a kind of restless torment; in which, though an historian of
great learning and of high academic distinction, he transformed
the Middle Ages by a process of subtle falsification, into a symbol
of his own latter-day New England longing; in which, though
a stylist of great power and precision, he propounded the aes-

11 This subject is fully discussed by H. B. Parkes, The Hound and Horn,
V-4, July-Sept. 1932, pages 581-601, and The Pragmatic Test.

173

thetic theory that modern art must be confused to express con-
fusion;12 in which, though a philosopher of a sort, he created one
of the most unphilosophical theories of history imaginable, as a
poetic symbol of his own despair. In the suicide of Henry Adams'
wife it is conceivable that we see the logical outcome of his own
dilemma, an outcome in his own case prevented by the inherit-
ance of character, which, like the inheritance of confusion, was
bequeathed him by early New England.13

In The Scarlet Letter, then, Hawthorne composed a great al-
legory; or, if we look first at the allegorical view of life upon
which early Puritan society was based, we might almost say
that he composed a great historical novel. History, which by
placing him in an anti-intellectual age had cut him off from the
ideas which might have enabled him to deal with his own pe-
riod, in part made up for the injustice by facilitating his en-
trance, for a brief time, into an age more congenial to his nature.
Had he possessed the capacity for criticizing and organizing con-
ceptions as well as for dramatizing them, he might have risen
superior to his disadvantages, but like many other men of major
genius he lacked this capacity. In turning his back upon the
excessively simplified conceptions of his Puritan ancestors, he
abandoned the only orderly concepts, whatever their limitations,
to which he had access, and in his last work he is restless and
dissatisfied. The four last romances arc unfinished, and in each
successive one he sought to incorporate and perfect elements from
those preceding; the last, The Dolliver Romance, which he had
sought to make the best, had he lived, is a mere fragment, but
on the face of it is the most preposterous of all. His dilemma,
the choice between abstractions inadequate or irrelevant to ex-
perience on the one hand, and experience on the other as far as
practicable unilluminated by understanding, is tragically charac-
teristic of the history of this country and of its literature; only a
few scattered individuals, at the cost of inordinate labor, and
often impermanently, have achieved the permeation of human

12 See the last three or four pages of Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres.
18 This idea is very ably defended by Katherine Simonds, the New England
Quarterly, December, 1936.

174

experience by a consistent moral understanding which results
in wisdom and in great art. If art is to he measured by the great-
ness of the difficulties overcome— and the measure is not wholly
unreasonable, for there can scarcely be virtue without a com-
prehension of sin, and the wider and more careful the compre-
hension the richer the virtue— then these few writers are very
great indeed. Hawthorne, when he reversed his formula of al-
ternative possibilities, and sought to grope his way blindly to
significance, made the choice of the later Romantics; and his
groping was met wherever he moved by the smooth and im-
passive surface of the intense inane.

175

FENIMORE COOPER
or The Ruins of Time

"From this point the northern side of the bay is a confused mass
of villages, villas, ruins, palaces, and vines, until we reach its extrem-
ity; a low promontory, like its opposite neighbor. A small island comes
next, a sort of natural sentinel; then the coast sweeps northward into
another and smaller bay, rich to satiety with relics of the past, termi-
nating at a point some miles farther seaward, with a high, reddish,
sandy bluff, which almost claims to be a mountain."

— Wing-and-Wing

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of Robert Spiller's admirable work on
Cooper,1 his importance as a social critic has been generally
recognized; his literary virtues have had in the past their dis-
tinguished admirers, though today his reputation as a literary
artist is very much in eclipse. Of these virtues Mr. Spiller, who
has done more for him than has any other critic of our period,
says relatively little, and it may be profitable to attempt a re-
definition of them in part in the light of Mr. Spiller's examina-
tion of the social theories.

Cooper believed in democratic government; and, as an aggres-
sively patriotic American, he was capable, among the enemies
of democratic theory, of going to considerable length in its de-
fense; but he distrusted the common and uneducated man— that
is, he feared irrational mob action; he feared that the idea of
democracy might easily be degraded into the dogma that what-
ever a majority decides is right. Such a degradation would result
naturally in the immediate subversion of law and of civilization;
and it would open the way for all kinds of illegal individual
action, which might in turn lead to the acquisition by a few

1 Fenimore Cooper, Critic of His Times, by Robert E. Spiller; Minton Balch
and Co., 1931.

I76

uneducated and unscrupulous men of great power, either by way
of finance or by way of demagoguery— that is, he saw that it
might be only a short step from irrational democracy to un-
scrupulous oligarchy. In such works as The Redskins, Home as
Found, and The Ways of the Hour— extremely bad novels, all
of them, but extremely acute criticism of his period and of ours
—he portrays and more particularly he comments directly upon
the incipient symptoms of the disease which he intensely feared,
even though he did not and could scarcely have been expected to
foresee the rapidity and extent of its development. In The Bravo,
in so far as the book is to be regarded merely as a social novel,
he depicts the evils of oligarchy; within a decade of his death, the
oligarchy of which he had discerned the first symptoms was
developing with astonishing rapidity, and within two decades of
his death it had as regards practical results rendered the legal
government very largely null, and the nation was adrift in the
administration of U. S. Grant.

The nature of this development he understood well enough;
with characteristically heavy but accurate irony, he described it
in the pages of his neglected satirical allegory, The Manikins,
a work which contains much of his ablest prose: "I found . . .
that the wisest and best of the species, or, what is much the same
thing, the most responsible, uniformly maintain that he who has
the largest stake in society is, in the nature of things, the most
qualified to administer its affairs. By a stake in society is meant,
agreeable to universal convention, a multiplication of those in-
terests which occupy us in our daily concerns— or what is vul-
garly called property. This principle works by exciting us to do
right through those heavy investments of our own which would
inevitably suffer were we to do wrong. The proposition is now
clear, nor can the premises readily be mistaken. Happiness is
the aim of society; and property, or a vested interest in society,
is the best pledge of our disinterestedness and justice, and the
best qualification for its proper control. It follows as a legitimate
corollary, that a multiplication of those interests will increase the
stake, and render us more and more worthy of the trust by
elevating us as near as may be to the pure and ethereal condition

177

of the angels." This may fairly be taken as a prophecy of the
approach, if not of the imminence, of celestial luminaries of the
quality of Vanderbilt, Sage, Drew, and Gould.

As a check to the social danger, he envisaged two defenses,
both of which were more or less in effect at the time of his writ-
ing, and both of which crumbled at the first impact of the enemy
in the actual event: abstract principle, as embodied in law, es-
pecially in the courts; and the extension into other parts of the
country, and the perpetuation, of an hereditary landed aristoc-
racy such as that of New York— of a class wealthy enough to
enjoy leisure for study and for self-cultivation, yet not wealthy
enough, and too cultivated to desire, to obtain inordinate power
for its own sake. This aristocracy should serve as a guide, a
model, and a stabilizing force; it was the class of which his
American Gentleman was the type. In the Littlepage trilogy he
made his most ambitious and successful effort to portray this
aristocracy as it had existed in New York and to define its social
function.

In connection with this check to the danger, he seems to have
been guilty of certain errors. He failed to see that because of
technological and industrial growth and because of the west-
ward expansion which was receiving only at the time of his
death the rapid acceleration which was to effect in three decades
the greatest migration in the annals, whether written or recon-
structed, of man, a new financial oligarchy was bound to arise
so rapidly as to render his landed aristocracy negligible and cas-
ually to feed upon and absorb it. Further, he apparently believed
it possible to establish in actual social institutions a close relation-
ship between worth and ability on the one hand, and, on the
other hand, wealth, family, and political influence, whereas all
history indicates this to be impossible. At the end of his life, he
still preferred democratic government to any other, but he had
little hope for democracy. Spiller quotes the following passage
from a posthumous fragment:2 "Nevertheless the community
will live on, suffer, and be deluded; it may even fancy itself
almost within reach of perfection, but it will live on to be dis-
*Ibid., pages 315-6.

appointed. There is no such thing on earth— and the only real
question for the American statesman is, to measure the results
of different defective systems for the government of the human
race. We are far from saying that our own, with all its flagrant
and obvious defects, will be the worst, more especially when con-
sidered solely in connection with whole numbers; though we
cannot deny, nor do we wish to conceal, the bitterness of the
wrongs that are so frequently inflicted by the many on the few.
This is, perhaps, the worst species of tyranny. He who suffers
under the arbitrary power of a single despot, or by the selfish
exactions of a privileged few, is certain to be sustained by the
sympathies of the masses. But he who is crushed by the masses
themselves must look beyond the limits of his earthly being for
consolation and support. The wrongs committed by democracies
are of the most cruel character; and though wanting in that ap-
parent violence and sternness that mark the course of law in the
hands of narrower governments, for it has no need of this se-
venty, they carry with them in their course all the feelings that
render injustice and oppression intolerable/'

Of these wrongs he himself had suffered more than the com-
mon portion. Out of love for his country and the desire to per-
petuate her institutions, he had criticized such of her vices as
appeared to imperil her life, and he had been met with hatred.
His criticism being unanswerable, and the hatred therefore in-
tense, he had been libelled in the press, and though for fifteen
years he had won suit after suit in the courts and had silenced
his detractors, the press had won the sympathy of the multitude
and Cooper had lost his public. He had defined for posterity
the dangers which threatened; and he had established in legal
precedent that was to endure until late in the century the laws
of libel and the public rights of the private gentleman; but he
knew at the end that he could not stay or turn the enchanneled
torrent of human stupidity, which, when eventually we regard
it behind us, we know as history. His concern was primarily
for public morality; it was the concern of the statesman, or of
the historian, first, and of the artist but secondarily; this concern
was already obsolescent in America, and Henry Adams found it

179

a generation after Cooper's death to be obsolete. Its disappear-
ance, no less than the disappearance of the theological dogmas
supporting private morality, contributed in some measure to the
later difficulties of Henry James.

ii

The Littlepage novels— Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The
Redskins— were written to illustrate a thesis: the justice of the
property-rights of the landed proprietors. But underlying this
is a more general thesis: the social function of an aristocracy,
a concept based on the old but dying social organization of New
York. To illustrate this thesis, he was forced to contrast the vir-
tues of the aristocracy with the defects of the vulgar; that this
contrast represented not his own complete view of the two social
classes thus roughly divided but an arbitrary isolation of qualities
in each class for purposes of expository effectiveness, we may
see readily enough in his other novels: in his novels of adven-
ture, his favbrite characters are drawn from the lower classes,
and in The Bravo, another thesis novel, this one written to ex-
hibit the dangers of oligarchy, his heroic figures are drawn from
the lower classes and his corrupt from the upper.

Like most novelists of class-struggle, he separated his charac-
ters pretty sharply into the more or less Calvinistical categories
of the socially saved and the socially damned. The only Ameri-
can novel of class-struggle of any importance, and so far as my
reading extends, to surpass this formula, is The Octopus, by
Frank Norris; a novel in which the social struggle sets in motion
and complicates certain dramas of private morality, so that we get
a novel of a ve?y impressive kind in spite of the illiteracy of two
thirds of the writing, and in spite of the plunge into Emersonian
mysticism at the close, in which the author endeavors to cancel
the drama that he has constructed. Since Cooper is dealing pri-
marily with manners and not with morals— that is, with society
as such, and not with the salvation of the soul— his figures must
of necessity be offered as representative social types and not as
moral abstractions like the figures in Hawthorne.
1 80

They are types of manners, and not types of morality; they are
thus closer to the surface of life, to the daily reality which we
perceive superficially about us; and we are tempted— or more
truly, we are forced— to regard them as human beings primarily,
not as dramatized ideas. But as human beings they are unduly
simplified, and in their purity of type inheres a certain quality,
very slight in a few cases, very great in a few, and moderately
obvious in most, of priggishness or of unreality. Furthermore, the
dichotomy of Good and Evil in Hawthorne is essentially so seri-
ous that the extreme concentration upon it which is implicit
in allegorical simplification appears justified. The corresponding
concepts in the field of manners, however,— the Genteel and the
Vulgar— appear at a considerable remove from the spiritual seri-
ousness of the Good and the Evil; we can demonstrate certain im-
perfect relationships between the two pairs of concepts easily
enough in a rational fashion, but the second pair is derivative
and therefore inferior, and it is bound to be felt as inferior when
perceived in action; so that a concentration by Cooper upon the
second pair of abstractions comparable, though far less intense,
to the concentration upon the first pair by Hawthorne, is certain
in itself to create in some degree an atmosphere of priggishness.
The vigor with which Cooper realizes at least a few characters
and patterns of action, and the sense with which he leaves us
when the books have long been read and laid away, of a rich
and varied way of life, are sufficient evidence of the reality of
his genius, for these ends are achieved in the face of obstacles.

This effect of priggishness is sure to be intensified in an era
like our own, in which the concept of a traditional aristocracy is
obsolete and even as an historical phenomenon is seldom under-
stood. For the modern American who has let himself be seduced
by any of the absolute categories of our own period— more es-
pecially, in this case, of the radical labor movement, since these
categories are diametrically opposed to those of Cooper— an under-
standing of Cooper, and I mean an understanding of Cooper
merely as an artist portraying in some measure a life which he
knew, may prove difficult or even impossible. Cooper's dichotomy
of the Genteel and the Vulgar may appear to correspond pre-

181

cisely to the later dichotomy of the Parasitic and the Productive,
the emphasis having been shifted from intrinsic qualities to what
is conceived as material effectiveness. For any modern American,
an act of sympathetic historical imagination is necessary to under-
stand Cooper; for the American whose perceptions are governed
by a scheme as simple as Cooper's, but the exact reverse of it,
this act will presumably be impossible.

Because of the simplification, the central figures of the Little-
page novels— the Littlepages and their respective loves— were
doomed to be uninteresting, even if Cooper had not had an
unqualified penchant for conventional sentimental romance as
the structural principle in plot. The secondary figures, even
when employed more or less obviously for illustrative purposes,
are frequently more successful. The best single creation of the
Littlepage novels— a creation rivalling Natty Bumppo— is Jason
Newcome, the devious and moralizing New Englander. In Sa-
tanstoe, the secondary and tragic love affair of Guert Ten Eyck
and of Mary Wallace is moving and suggests complexity and
fullness of character not found in any other love story in Cooper.
Guert, Mary Wallace, the loping dominie, Andries Coejemans,
and in a smaller measure the somewhat melodramatic but still
effective Aaron Thousandacres, are memorable creations.

In the first two novels, especially, of the Littlepage trilogy,
Cooper endeavored to underline certain aspects of New York
society which he believed deserving of preservation and exten-
sion; and in the third of the series, The Redskins, he sought
primarily to demonstrate the opposing evil, the evil of confusing
the whim of the mob with the principle of democracy, a subject
with which he dealt in other late novels: in The Crater, in Home
as Found, and especially in The Ways of the Hour, a novel in
which is portrayed in a manner of the greatest accuracy so far
as the social phenomena are concerned, though profoundly un-
satisfactory as art, the way in which criminal justice may be
subverted by unrestrained popular meddling. In The Redskins,
Home as Found, and The Ways of the Hour Cooper is nearly
at his worst as a novelist— his worst, absolutely considered, is the
initial effort, Precaution, and its nearest rival, perhaps, is Mer
182

cedes of Castille—for in these three works, he is not displaying
a way of life, but is demonstrating assorted vices and his tend-
ency to overemphasis becomes so extreme as to destroy both plot
and character. The criticism offered in these books, however,
is both just and penetrating, and the reader with taste and pa-
tience can cull from them if he so desires a collection of epigrams
as sound, as biting, and as numerous as he is likely to find in any
other three volumes in English. The Monikins, a satirical alle-
gory on the subject of various social systems, though tiresome in
the main, offers the same fragmentary rewards, and perhaps in
a larger measure, in addition to the remarkable summary of the
life and death of the elder Goldencalf, with which the work
begins.

The Monikins has commonly been regarded as one of the
worst of Cooper's efforts, and even those who have found it in
one manner or another interesting have objected to the narrator's
account of his pedigree and of his childhood, but there is some-
thing horrible in the account, which, brief and fragmentary as
the passage may be, is unrivalled in its particular fashion in Eng-
lish prose. "I have generally considered myself on a level with the
most ancient gentlemen of Europe, on the score of descent," says
the narrator, "few families being more clearly traced into the
mist of time than that of which I am a member. My descent from
my father is undeniably established by the parish register as well
as by the will of that person himself, and I believe no man could
more directly prove the truth of the whole career of his family
than it is in my power to show that of my ancestor up to the
hour when he was found, in the second year of his age, crying
with cold and hunger in the parish of St. Giles, in the city of
Westminster, and in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. " In
the same tone of precise and unwavering respect, the career of
the elder Goldencalf, financial and domestic, and fearful in its
intense inhumanity, is carried to its close: "The difficult breath-
ing, haggard countenance, and broken utterance of my father
struck me with awe. This was the first death-bed by which I had
ever stood; and the admonishing picture of time passing into
eternity was indelibly stamped on my memory. It was not only

183

a death-bed scene, but it was a family death-bed scene. I know
not how it was, but I thought my ancestor looked more like the
Goldencalfs than I had ever seen him look before/' Thomas
Goldencalf is literally on the brink of eternity throughout the
short narrative; for, as his son, the supposed narrator, informs
us, he rose directly and with no antecedents from the obscurity
of time, and his life was reduced so purely to a single passion,
one might say to a single perception, that he existed but as a
silhouette upon the void and sank as directly into the void as he
had arisen from it. The cold and formal irony of the prose
achieves at times a metaphysical violence which puts one in
mind of Pope.

The Bravo, one of the most important of the novels of social
criticism, suffers in certain respects by comparison with the first
two novels of the Littlepage trilogy: no single Italian character is
realized with the same effect of intimacy as that achieved in the
best American characters, although no major character, perhaps,
is quite so simplified as are the representatives of the Littlepage
family itself /for the conception of The Bravo does not enforce
such simplification. The protagonist is a more or less normal
man, endeavoring to maintain his integrity in a struggle with a
variety of hidden evils. He is essentially active and individual,
and not a social type, although the subtleties of his surface are
not rendered with any such perception as that displayed in the
creation of Jason Newcome and of Guert Ten Eyck. The man-
ner in which the aristocrats themselves are corrupted by their
fears of each other— the subtle inter-relation and inter-propaga-
tion among such vices as avarice, desire for power, and fear-
offers a moral portrait worthy of Hawthorne.

The stylistic tone of The Bravo is of the slightly sentimental
variety at the time regarded as indispensable to historical ro-
mance; this is no doubt a defect, but the tone is at least con-
sistently maintained, so that once one has become familiar with
it, one can in a measure forget it, and can appreciate subtleties
of perception much as in any other style. The fifteenth chapter,
for example, describing the murder of Antonio, is very impres-
sive as one comes to it in the actual narrative, but is much less
184

impressive if one reads it in isolation. Coming to it from the be-
ginning of the story, one is not only familiar with the style, but
one is acutely aware of the symbolic value of the moonlit water,
and of fragments of action discernible upon it, in this narrative
of secret and evasive evil. In isolation the passage appears to
display something of the over-wrought affectation of Poe; in its
context, the tone is supported, as it is never supported in Poe,
by a comprehensible theme, so that the details, melodramatic,
perhaps, if read alone, are sustained by a genuinely dramatic
significance. The two companion pieces of The Bravo, The
Heidenmauer and The Headsman, are less remarkable, though
The Heidenmauer contains a fairly memorable character in the
Abbot of Limburg.

in

In the Leatherstocking Series, as in the other novels of American
history and of frontier adventure, and as in the sea stories (ex-
cept The Crater}, we have nothing whatever to do with social
criticism, or at least nothing of importance. One of the Leather-
stocking Series, however, The Pioneers, the fourth in the series
but the first to be written, should be mentioned in connection
with Satanstoe and The Chainhearer as one of Cooper's three
most interesting novels of manners; like the first two Littlepage
novels, it is a portrait of life on the frontier, but in a considerable
measure of the semi-aristocratic frontiersman. These three works
should be regarded as a prelude to such works by Mrs. Wharton
as the four novelettes of the Old New York Series and The
Age of Innocence; in spite of great defects they have great vigor,
and as regards the portrayal of their particular place and period
they have no rivals and must always remain as a part of our his-
torical literature if as nothing more.

The inferiority of plot in Cooper to the incidental is tacitly
recognized by him in the fact that the one figure who unifies all
five of the Leatherstocking novels is a secondary figure in all of
them; in each novel he is the practical abettor of the loves of the
pair about whom the conventional plot is constructed, although

in The Pathfinder he appears for a time as a rival in love to his
friend.

These novels are familiar to every reader, and comment upon
them may appear superfluous; nevertheless, familiarity appears
to have bred in this case a good deal of contempt, and certain
things, perhaps, need to be stated briefly.

It is the isolated adventures of Natty, and the continuity of his
character, that bring the novels to life; although there are other
excellent characterizations, especially of the residents of the fron-
tier village of The Pioneers, and of the Indians Mahtoree and
Hardheart, and of the emigrant family of The Prairie. And here
we begin to encounter some of the strange paradoxes of Cooper's
achievement; for if Natty is his greatest single achievement—
and great he is, a great national myth, with a life over and above
the life of the books in which he appears, a reality surpassing
that even of an historical figure such as Daniel Boone— yet only
two of these novels, The Pioneers and conceivably The Prairie,
could rank among Cooper's half dozen best individual novels.
Furthermore/the best single passage of prose in Cooper is prob-
ably the seventh chapter of The Deerslayer,. a book which dis-
plays few other serious merits, and which even as a story purely
of adventure is far inferior in plot and in movement to half a
dozen other stories by Cooper. The next best prose in the series,
and perhaps in Cooper, though this is doubtful, is probably to
be found in the first and last chapters of The Prairie, heavily
dramatic as they may conceivably be. The best single plot of
adventure in Cooper is beyond a doubt that of The Last of the
Mohicans, but the style in this work is so consistently florid and
redundant that in spite of the action, in spite of the magnificent
timing of many scenes, in spite of a certain amount of fairly
respectable characterization, the book nowhere rises to a level of
seriousness. It is curious that the tone of conventional romance
which vitiates a great part of his effort should have accumulated
so unfortunately here, for there are passages in other books in the
series which are not only beautiful but beautiful in a restrained
and classical fashion, and which display great richness of moral
substance.

1 86

The seventh chapter of The Deerslayer, or more properly its
first incident, Natty's encounter with the Indian whom he is
forced to kill, is probably as great an achievement of its length
as one will find in American fiction outside of Melville. The
prose is plain and factual, yet by rendering with a kind of bare
precision the drifting of the canoes, the motion of the water, and
the caution with which Natty views the edge of the forest,
Cooper communicates with a power that has rarely been equalled
the tremendous and impersonal quiet of the virgin American
wilderness: "The air, for wind it could scarcely be called, was
still light, it is true, but it had increased a little in the course of
the night, and as the canoes were mere feathers on the water,
they had drifted twice the expected distance; and, what was still
more dangerous, had approached so near the base of the moun-
tain that here rose precipitously from the eastern shore as to
render the carols of the birds plainly audible. This was not the
worst. The third canoe had taken the same direction, and \va^
slowly drifting toward a point where it must inevitably touch,
unless turned aside by a shift of wind or human hands. In other
respects nothing presented itself to attract attention or to awaken
alarm/'

One of the canoes goes aground, and Natty must rescue it, in
spite of the danger to himself, in order to insure the safety of his
friends. "If anyone had been lying in wait for the arrival of the
waif, he must be seen, and the utmost caution in approaching
the shore became indispensable; if no one was in ambush, hurry
was unnecessary. The point being nearly diagonally opposite the
Indian encampment, he hoped the last, though the former was
not only possible but probable; for the savages were prompt in
adopting all the expedients of their particular modes of warfare,
and quite likely had many scouts searching the shores for crafts
to carry them off to the castle. As a glance at the lake from any
height or projection would expose the smallest object on its sur-
face, there was little hope that either of the canoes could pass
unseen; and Indian sagacity needed no instruction to tell which
way a boat or a log would drift when the direction of the wind
was known. As Deerslayer drew nearer and nearer to the land,

,87

the stroke of his paddle grew slower, his eye became more watch-
ful, and his ears and nostrils almost dilated with the effort to
detect any lurking danger. 'Twas a trying moment for a novice,
nor was there the encouragement which even the timid some-
times feel when conscious of being observed and commended.
He was entirely alone, thrown on his own resources, and was
cheered by no friendly eye, emboldened by no encouraging voice.
Notwithstanding all these circumstances, the most experienced
veteran in forest warfare could not have behaved better. Equally
free from recklessness and hesitation, his advance was marked by
a sort of philosophical prudence that appeared to render him
superior to all motives but those which were best calculated to
effect his purpose. Such was the commencement of a career in
forest exploits that afterward rendered this man, in his way, and
under the limits of his habits and opportunities, as renowned as
many a hero whose name has adorned the pages of works more
celebrated than legends simple as ours can ever become." The
explicit comment of the historian at the close of this passage is
one of the greatest triumphs of Cooper's rhetoric; the quietness
of the prose and of the scene is not impaired, but the prose sud-
denly takes on a quality of universality and of grandeur such as
to prepare one for the metaphysical quality of the action shortly
to follow.

The Indian in ambush fires and misses, attacks, and then, be-
ing outwitted by Deerslayer but allowed to escape, retreats to
cover; Deerslayer is quickly on shore and behind a tree. Then
commences the series of hesitations on the part of Deerslayer to
kill this man, hesitations which arouse the wonder and then the
contempt of the Indian. Deerslayer has never killed a man, yet
he has embarked upon the career of a professional scout, and
this Indian is his enemy. His wonder, his hesitation, the infal-
libility of his instincts and muscular reactions, the immense
passivity of the morning wilderness, give the scene something of
the tenderness and wonder of idyllic first love. But this is first
death, and not first love; and the act must be committed in soli-
tude and with deliberation. Deerslayer's consciousness of the
significance of the act which he momently withholds, and the
1 88

pure spiritual isolation of the consciousness, the quiet clarity with
which the whole is rendered, constitute, surely, one of the jnost
remarkable passages in our literature.

After some maneuvering, Deerslayer persuades the Indian to
give up the canoes without bloodshed, or he believes that he per-
suades him, and then, after a momentary suspicion of treachery,
he pushes off from shore: ''This distrust, however, seemed to be
altogether uncalled for, and, as if ashamed to have entertained it,
the young man averted his look, and stepped carelessly up to
his boat. Here he began to push the canoe from the shore, and
to make his other preparations for departing. He might have
been thus employed a minute, when, happening to turn his face
toward the land, his quick and certain eye told him at a glance,
the imminent jeopardy in which his life was placed. The black,
ferocious eyes of the savage were glancing on him, like those of
the crouching tiger, through a small opening in the bushes, and
the muzzle of his rifle seemed already to be opening in a line
with his own body.

"Then, indeed, the long practice of Deerslayer as a hunter did
him good service. Accustomed to fire with the deer on the bound,
and often when the precise position of the animal's body had in
a manner to be guessed at, he used the same expedients here.
To cock and poise his rifle were the acts of a single moment and
a single motion; then, aiming almost without sighting, he fired
into the bushes where he knew a body ought to be in order to
sustain the appalling countenance which alone was visible. There
was not time to raise the piece any higher or to take a more
deliberate aim. So rapid were his movements that both parties
discharged their pieces at the same instant, the concussions min-
gling in one report. The mountains, indeed, gave back but a
single echo. Deerslayer dropped his piece, and stood, with head
erect, steady as one of the pines in the calm of a June morning,
watching the result, while the savage gave the yell that has be-
come historical for its appalling influence, leaped through the
bushes, and came bounding across the open ground, flourishing a
tomahawk. Still Deerslayer moved not, but stood with his un-
loaded rifle fallen against his shoulders, while, with a hunter's

189

habits, his hands were mechanically feeling for the powder-horn
and charger. When about forty feet from his enemy, the savage
hurled his keen weapon; but it was with an eye so vacant, and
a hand so unsteady and feeble, that the young man caught it as
it was flying past him. At that instant the Indian staggered and
fell his whole length on the ground/' We have thus the instan-
taneous coincidence of intuition and determinant action, and the
quick rush and ebbing of life, as symbolized by the case with
which the hatchet falls into the hand of Deerslayer; and there-
after a brief passage in which the Indian dies in Deerslayer's
arms at the edge of the lake, a passage in which the quiet of the
morning is reestablished. One should mention also Deerslayer's
perception of the opening of the rifle muzzle, a fine detail, by
means of which his perception of the Indian's aim is communi-
cated.

The skill of this backwoodsman, and the skill as well as other
characteristics attributed by Cooper to the Indians, are frequently
derided, but 'probably with small justice. In any environment
certain particular skills will be generally developed, which are
foreign to other environments, and the skills required in the
wilderness are now far away from us and of their nature we can
have but very small understanding. Yet the feats performed in
Cooper's novels with the canoe are of no greater moment than
the feats performed daily on our highways with much more dan-
gerous engines, sometimes disastrously, often with success; they
are as nothing compared to the daily feats of the army flyer. We
should remember, moreover, that if any particular way of life
long exists, or even if any particular exercise is long practiced
with assiduity, there will inevitably arise, once or twice or oc-
casionally more often in a generation, an individual of a skill
such as far to surpass the powers of credible description, The
boxer of genius, or even the billiard-player of genius, may per-
form feats which if recounted in detail would seem far less plau-
sible than the most extraordinary feats of Leatherstocking.

Furthermore, as to feats of woodmanship, the historic feats of
the partisan leader, Rogers, as described by the meticulous Park-

190

man in Montcalm and Wolfe, surpass anything imagined by
Cooper. And Parkman, who objects to Cooper's treatment of
Indian character, especially in regard to the capacity delineated
for heroic action and for love at a higher level than that of
physical passion, yet recounts in The Conspiracy of Pontiac the
case of a young Indian who followed his white mistress back to
the edge of the settlements when she had been captured by a
marauding band of whites, in order to be with her as long as pos-
sible and to hunt for her; and his account of Pontiac himself
establishes that remarkable Ottawa not only as a man of genius
but as thoroughly capable of heroic action. Our historic knowl-
edge of Tecumseh, of King Philip, of Massassoit, of the humane
and heroic Canonchet, should justify Cooper beyond all question
at least as regards the general outlines of his characterization.
That such characters were exceptional among the Indians goes
without saying, but they would have been exceptional anywhere;
and that there were aspects of Indian life on which Cooper
seldom dwells is equally certain, but it is also true that the houses
of Shakespeare's London were in general, drafty, smoky, dirty,
infected with disease, and full of vermin, and Shakespeare is not
in general blamed for dealing primarily with the spiritual prob-
lems of such men as Macbeth and Coriolanus.

Anyone who will take the trouble to acquaint himself with the
works of Parkman— and anyone who will not is to be commis-
erated in general and distrusted in particular as a commentator
on certain aspects of American literature and history— or anyone
who will read a dozen odd journals of life in the wilderness, will
scarcely, I imagine, object very seriously to this aspect of Cooper
on purely factual grounds. Cooper errs not in the plausibility of
his facts, but in relying so heavily for the maintenance of inter-
est on so limited a range of facts, and frequently in the sentimen-
tal and inflated redundancy with which the facts are rendered;
and so far as the Indians are concerned, this redundancy is not
without its verisimilitude, whatever we may think of its absolute
merits as style, for the eloquence of the Indians in their more
formal and heroic moments, as we find it recorded by those who

191

knew them intimately and in their primitive condition, is not
as remote from the redundant passages of Cooper as one might
at first glance suppose.

This particular defect of style damages white and Indian char-
acter about equally, so far as its effect on the modern reader is
concerned— and indeed, though the Indian, historically consid-
ered, may actually have employed a roughly similar style on cer-
tain occasions, one may reasonably protest that in the interests
of true eloquence he should not have done so— but in some of
the novels, in which the style is not pushed to the appalling
limits reached in The Last of the Mohicans, one becomes, as I
have said in discussing The Bravo, more or less accustomed to it,
and forgets it. This is largely true of The Wept of Wish-ton-
Wish, a novel containing three of Coopers best Indian Char-
acters, all of them based on historic Indians: Uncas, the Pequot
or Mohegan, who betrayed his chieftain, Sassacus, sold himself
to the English, and helped in the destruction of his own people,
first in the Pequot War, and later, as an old man, in King Philip's
War; Philip, or Metacom, the Wampanoag; and Canonchet, the
Narraganset. One of the better scenes in Cooper, in spite of the
sentimental rhetoric is that in which Uncas, who feels himself
to be judged a traitor by his captive Canonchet, whose father,
Miantonomo, he had murdered years before, endeavors to break
the moral character of Canonchet by subtle spiritual torture be-
fore murdering him. The conception of Canonchet's white wife,
who recovers only at the moment before death her memory of
childhood and her childish fear of the forest and of the Indian
as the symbols of darkness and of evil, is a conception which
deserved a more successful rendering, but which is rendered with
sufficient success to merit more appreciation than it has received.3
This novel is notable also for certain passages of historical ex-
position, especially in the earlier chapters; passages in which
Cooper appears as one of the last representatives of the great
tradition of formal historical narrative, of which Hume, Gibbon,
and Macaulay are the masters. The passages are brief and scat-

8 Parkman recounts in Pontiac, Chapter XXVIII, an historical incident
closely though incompletely resembling this.

192

tered; they show the tradition in a state of decay, and corroded
by sentiment; but they are still in the great tradition, and as prose
they probably surpass most passages of comparable length to be
found in Prescott or even in Parkman; they are a moving, if
melancholy, spectacle.

One other novel of frontier adventure, The Oak Openings,
deserves particular attention, if only because of its extraordinary
difference from the other novels on similar subjects, As a story
of simple adventure, it is one of Cooper's best; as a portrait of
the Indian in his more familiar and less heroic moments, it is
both convincing and amusing and has no parallel in Cooper or
elsewhere in our literature. The scenes in which the assembled
chieftains discuss the anthropological theories of the errant clergy-
man and conclude that the Indians are not descended from the
lost tribes of Israel are especially admirable. "I am a Pottawat-
tamie," says Crowsfeather. "My brothers know that tribe. It is
not a tribe of Jews, but a tribe of Injins. It is a great tribe. It
never was lost. It cannot be lost. No tribe better knows all the
paths, and all the best routes to every point where it wishes to
go. It is foolish to say you can lose a Pottawattamie. A duck
would be as likely to lose itself as a Pottawattamie. I do not speak
for the Ottawas; I speak for the Pottawattamies. . . . We are
not lost; we are not Jews. I have done."

IV

In addition to the novels which I have mentioned and a few
others of similar nature, there remain a somewhat miscellaneous
lot of novels superficially of a class in that they are all novels
of adventure and all save two, The Spy and Lionel Lincoln, of
adventure at sea.

The Spy, a very early and fairly popular work, is a second
rate novel of adventure, as are also Homeward Bound? The Pilot,
and The Two Admirals. The Red Rover, a sea story, is probably
the best tale of adventure, questions of style aside, to be found
in Cooper except for The Last of the Mohicans, but like The
Last of the Mohicans it has few other merits. Afloat and Ashore,

'93

and its sequel, Miles Wallingford, combine fair sea-adventure,
one of the best incidents being based on an actual occurrence
recounted by Irving in his Astoria, with a fairly pleasant and
moderately sentimental portrait of early New York manners.
Jack Tier is a novel of sentimental adventure at sea which is
chiefly remarkable for the portrait of the extraordinary figure
from whom the book takes its title; among the sea stories, it has
something of the casual charm displayed by The Oak Openings
among the novels of the wilderness. The Sea Lions, though dif-
fuse and full of irrelevancies, offers a portrait of Yankee avarice
in a struggle with death in the antarctic circle, which deserved
a more careful treatment.

Three other stones— Lionel Lincoln, Wing-and-Wing,. and es-
pecially The Water-Witch— are remarkable for their rhetorical
experiments, and display Cooper in a capacity in which he has
never been seriously studied or even regarded.

In Lionel Lincoln, the character in connection with whom the
experimental rhetoric is most often successful, is Polwarth, a
British officer stationed in Boston, a gentleman by birth and
courageous by nature, but stout, overfond of eating, and some-
what talkative. Polwarth must beyond any question be the proto-
type of W. G. Simms' Porgy, and though Cooper makes less
use of Polwarth than Simms makes of his southerner, Cooper's
portrait is in some ways the more effective. Polwarth speaks a
species of semi-Elizabethan prose which is not without its wit
and its poetry, and of which the very affectation has a real stylis-
tic charm. The following passage, taken from the ninth chapter,
is descriptive of the removal of the British troops from Boston the
night before the battle of Lexington :

"Polwarth had established himself by the side of Lionel, much
to the ease of his limbs, and as they moved slowly into the light,
all those misgivings which had so naturally accompanied his
musings on the difficulties of a partisan irruption, vanished be-
fore the loveliness of the time, and possibly before the quietude
of the action.

" There are moments when I could fancy the life of a sailor/
he said, leaning indolently back, and playing with one hand in

194

the water. This pulling about in boats is easy work, and must
be capital assistance for a heavy digestion, inasmuch as it fur-
nishes air with as little violent exercise as may be. Your marine
should lead a merry life of it!'

" They are said to murmur at the clashing of their duties with
those of the sea-officers/ said Lionel; 'and I have often heard
them complain of a want of room to make use of their legs/

" 'Humph!' ejaculated Polwarth; 'the leg is a part of a man
for which I see less actual necessity than for any other portion
of his frame. I often think there has been a sad mistake in the
formation of the animal; as, for instance, one can be a very good
waterman, as you see, without legs— a good fiddler, a first-rate
tailor, a lawyer, a doctor, a parson, a very tolerable cook, and in
short, anything but a dancing-master. I see no use in a leg unless
it be to have the gout— at any rate, a leg of twelve inches is as
good as one a mile long, and the saving might be appropriated
to the nobler parts of the animal; such as the brain and the
stomach.'

" Tou forget the officer of light-infantry/ said Lionel, laugh-
ing- ^

" Tou might give him a couple of inches more; though as
everything in this wicked world is excellent only by comparison,
it would amount to the same thing, and on my system a man
would be just as fit for the light-infantry without, as with legs;
and he would get rid of a good deal of troublesome manoeuver-
ing, especially of this new exercise. It would then become a de-
lightful service, Leo; for it may be said to monopolize all the
poetry of military life, as you may see. Neither the imagination
nor the body can require more than we enjoy at this moment, and
of what use, I would ask, are our legs? if anything, they are in-
cumbrances in this boat. Here we have a soft moon, and softer
seats— smooth water, and a stimulating air— on one side fine coun-
try, which, though but faintly seen, is known to be fertile and
rich to abundance; and on the other a picturesque town, stored
with condiments of every climate— even those rascally privates
look mellowed by the moonbeams, with their scarlet coats and
glittering arms! . . . Where now are your companies of the

195

lines; your artillery and dragoons; your engineers and staff! night-
capped and snoring to a man, while we enjoy here the very des-
sert of existence— I wish I could hear a nightingale!' "

This is obviously less excellent than Falstaff, but on the other
hand it does not really endeavor to compete with Falstaff, and,
having a minor excellence of its own, should survive the com-
parison. I should like to insist that here, as in other scattered
passages of Cooper, there is a prose possessing at once an au-
thentic poetic perception and a rhetorical procedure both ingen-
ious and controlled; that these scattered passages are frequently
of sufficient length to be impressive; that among them there is
considerable variety as regards the kind of prose employed; and
that they display a stylist superior to any other in America— and
I do not except Hawthorne—before Melville, one who in some
respects foreshadows Melville, and one who can still be examined
with pleasure and with profit.

In Wing-and-Wing, Cooper writes a story of his favorite type
of sailing vessel, a light and elusive fugitive from authority; and
he places the vessel in the marine setting which of all he regarded
as the most beautiful and the most ethereal, the Mediterranean.
The plot, as in nearly all of his tales of adventure, is one of pur-
suit and flight, but in these conditions the pursuit and flight
acquire an air of illusion which at a few moments, especially in
the discussion of solipsistic philosophy which takes place be-
tween the vice-governor of Elba and his podesta while halfway
down the ship's ladder of a British cruiser, all but evaporates into
madness.

Wing-and-Wing, though occasionally amusing or even beauti-
ful, is less certain of its intention than the earlier novel of a some-
what similar kind, The Water-Witch. The action of The Water-
Witch is extremely unreal, and the unreality, not to say the im-
possibility of much of it, would be preposterous did Cooper not
utilize this very quality. It has the plot, entrances, exits, abduc-
tions, and mysteries of a comic opera; and the style is adjusted
to the plot in a manner at once brilliant and meticulous. Plot
and character alike have the unreality, but the consistency within
themselves, of the plot and character, let us say, of Volpone; and
196

Cooper endeavors to achieve a style not dissimilar, so far as the
limits of prose permit, to the style of Jonson's dramatic verse. This
novel, though imperfect artistically, is imperfect in minor ways;
questions of scope aside, it is probably Cooper's ablest piece of
work, as it is certainly one of the most brilliant, if scarcely one of
the most profound, masterpieces of American prose.

The numerous quotations from Shakespeare employed in this
work give a clue to the Elizabethan models for the prose; and if
they did not, there would be clues sufficiently obvious scattered
throughout the prose itself. The following commentary, for ex-
ample is spoken by the incredible Thomas Tiller: " 'Every craft
has its allotted time, like a mortal/ continued the inexplicable
mariner of the India-shawl. If she is to die a sudden death, there
is your beam-end and stern-way, which takes her into the grave
without funeral service or parish prayers; your dropsy is being
water-logged; gout and rheumatism kill like a broken back and
loose joints; indigestion is a shifting cargo, with guns adrift; the
gallows is a bottomry-bond, with lawyers' fees; while fire, drown-
ing, death by religious melancholy, and suicide, are a careless
gunner, sunken rocks, false lights, and a lubberly captain/ "

The best prose, however, is to be found where the imitation
of rhetorical forms is not so close, but where the intention of
schematization is equally marked. The two most successful char-
acters, from the point of view of one who seeks this particular
quality, are the loquacious Dutch Alderman, Van Beverout, and
his taciturn and aristocratic young friend, Oloff Van Staats, the
Patroon of Kinderhook, the former as a commentator on the
action and on life at large, and the latter as one providing much
food for comment. To the reader who does not find a certain
pleasure in the texture of the prose in which the meditations of
the Alderman are couched, the Alderman must needs be very
tiresome; but his reveries and his commercial imagery possess a
hard and clear, if somewhat baroque and elaborate, beauty,
which, though it does not lend itself convincingly to brief quota-
tion, is fairly impressive in the text.

The essential difficulty in connection with these rhetorical ex-
cursions resides simply in the fact that the subject is never ade-

197

quate to permit the extraction from the rhetoric its Full possi-
bilities, so that we have a species of lyricism, which, though real
enough, is frequently all but verbal or even syntactical; we have
something approaching pure rhetoric. Cooper conceived a comic-
opera plot to provide the motive for his poetry; in Moby Dick,
on the other hand, the plot is the plot of an epic, and not only
are the possibilities of the rhetoric exhausted, but the rhetoric
has greater possibilities.

v

If we except The Water-Witch, a minor but original master-
piece, not flawless, perhaps, but still a unit, we find Cooper to
be essentially a man of fragments; it is likely that the best part
of him is in the fragments, moreover, and not in The Water-
Witch. He embodies a social ideal that in his own lifetime was
so far gone in decay that his defense of it cost him his reputation,
and that it may scarcely be said to have survived him to the extent
of two decades. He displays at his best a rhetorical grandeur of a
kind cognate with his social ideals, but habitual rather than
understood, and commonly collapsing for lack of support from his
action; that is, he displays a great traditional moral sense cor-
roded by the formulary romantic sentiment of his own period,
and apparently with no realization that the two are incompatible.
On a few occasions he displays great vigor of conception, as in
the creation of such plots as The Sea Lions and The Wept of
Wish-ton-Wish, as in the creation of such characters as Leather-
stocking and Jason Newcome, as in the residual feeling of inti-
macy with which he leaves one, from perhaps a half-dozen of
novels, with life in frontier and provincial New York. This is a
vigor which has little to do with rhetoric, or at least has to do with
it but seldom, and which frequently survives a great deal of bad
rhetoric: the figure of Leatherstocking emerges from the debris
of the five novels in which he was created, independent, au-
thentic, and unforgettable. For the American who desires a polite
education in his own literature, the five novels of the Leather-
stocking series are indispensable, as are the first two Littlepagc
198

novels, The Bravo, and The Water-Witch. For the American
who desires an education historical as well as literary, and richly
literary instead of superficially, the entire work should be ex-
humed. It is a mass of fragments, no doubt; but the fragments are
those of a civilization.

199

HERMAN MELVILLE
and The Problems of Moral Navigation

"The ribs and terrors of the whale

Arched over me a dismal gloom. . . ."

Father Maple's hymn, in MOBY DICK

IN Pierre, Melville remarks: "Fortunately for the felicity of the
Dilettante in Literature, the horrible allegorical meanings of the
Inferno lie not on the surface." We naturally desire to shelter
the dilettante as far as possible; but when he obscures a writer of
Melville's dimensions for three quarters of a century, we begin to
find him an obstacle in our own paths. The field of Melville
criticism is fa* more heartening than it was thirty years ago, for
there is much activity; the activity, unfortunately, is for the
greater part desperately confused. If one is bent on an under-
standing of Melville, his greatest work, Moby Dick, is the most
complete statement of his subject;1 two unsuccessful works,
Pierre and The Confidence Man, come next in this particular
respect. I shall therefore begin with Moby Dick.

The symbolism of Moby Dick is based on the antithesis of the
sea and the land: the land represents the known, the mastered,
in human experience; the sea, the half-known, the obscure region
of instinct, uncritical feeling, danger, and terror.

"Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two
thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

"Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one

1 In my remarks on the symbolism of Moby Dick, I am indebted for a good
many details to an unpublished thesis by Achilles Holt, done at Stanford Uni-
versity. Mr. Holt examines the subject very minutely, and I have used only a
small part of his material; his thesis ought to be published. On the other hand,
I have added a good deal of my own, and I differ radically with Mr. Holt as to
his interpretation of the central theme, that is, in regard to the significance of
Ahab's character and actions.

2OO

is not a miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon
the Hebrews, when under the feet of Korah and his company
the live ground opened and swallowed them up for ever; yet not
a modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner the live
sea swallows up ships and crews.

"But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is alien to it,
but it is also a fiend to its own offspring; worse than the Persian
host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures
which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that overlays her
own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against
the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks
of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting
and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the
masterless ocean overruns the globe.

"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded crea-
tures glide under the water, unapparent for the most part, and
treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Con-
sider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most
remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many
species of sharks. Consider once more the universal cannibalism
of the sea, all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying
on eternal war since the world began.

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and
most docile earth. Consider them both, the sea and the land; and
do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For
as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul
of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but
encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God help
thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"

The ocean is the home of demons and symbols of evil too nu-
merous to mention. It is the home especially of Moby Dick, the
white whale, the chief symbol and spirit of evil; it is also the
home of the great white squid, chaotic and formless, the symbol
of chance in life: "A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and
breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water; in-
numerable long arms radiating from its center, and curling and
twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to catch at any hap-

201

less object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have;
no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but un-
dulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like
apparition of life/*

Pip, the little negro boy, falls overboard from a whale boat;
that is, he is immersed in the sea. As a result, and after his rescue,
he is mad. In the chapter entitled The Mast-head, Ishmael speaks
of his own contemplation of the sea from aloft, where he had
been sent as a look-out: ". . . lulled into such an opium-like list-
lessness of vacant unconscious revery is this absent-minded youth
by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he
loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible
image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind
and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding beautiful thing
that eludes him; every dimly discovered, uprising fin of some
undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elu-
sive thoughts that only people the soul by continuously flitting
through it. In this enchanted mood thy spirit ebbs away to
whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like
Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of
every shore the round globe over.

'There is no life in thee now, except that rocking life im-
parted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea;
by the sea from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep,
this dream, is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your
hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Des-
cartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest
weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that
transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.
Heed it well, ye Pantheists!"

The relationship of man to the known and to the half known,
however, is not a simple and static one; he cannot merely stay
on land, or he will perish of imperception, but must venture on
the sea, without losing his relationship to the land; we have, in
brief, the relationship of principle to perception, or, in other
words, the problem of judgment. This is made clear in the invo-
cation to Bulkington, a helmsman even more memorable than

202

Palinurus, in the chapter entitled The Lee Shore: 'When on
that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive
bows into the cold malicious waves, whom should I see standing
at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and
fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from
a four years' dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off
again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorch-
ing to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable;
deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the
stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared vvith
him as with the storm-tossed ship that miserably drives along the
leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful;
in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets,
friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the
port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hos-
pitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would
make her shudder through and through. With all her might she
crowds all sail off shore; in so doing fights 'gainst the very winds
that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed seas'
landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril;
her only friend her bitterest foe!

"Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of
that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence
of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire
to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shore-
less, indefinite as God— so, better is it to perish in that howling
infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that
were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl
to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take
heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up
from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up leaps thy
apotheosis!"

It should be observed that this passage is addressed to a helms-
man, governed by the laws of his calling, and obeying the com-
mands of a navigator, one who guides the ship with reference

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to the position of the land. Symbolically, the passage represents
the process of living by judgment; that is by perception of in-
dividual, shifting, and chaotic phenomena, but by perception
trained in principle, in abstraction, to the point where it is able
to find its way amid the chaos of the particular. Ahab is ulti-
mately betrayed to his end by the white whale, who is the spirit
of evil, in the farthest Pacific, after destroying his quadrant (the
instrument which gives him his mathematical position upon the
ocean), after having his compass needle reversed by a storm (a
warning that he should turn about and retrace his way), after the
snapping of his log-line (which enabled him to gauge his posi-
tion roughly), and after the sinking of the life-buoy and the
caulking of Queequeg's coffin to take its place.

With these basic ideas, and these few illustrative passages
clearly in mind, we may follow the details of the book with great
facility.

Ishmael, having decided to go to sea, notes the attraction
which the sea possesses for landsmen : "Circumambulate the city
of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coen-
ties Slip, and from there by Whitehall, northward. What do you
see?— Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thou-
sands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.
Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads;
some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high
aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward
peep. But these are all landsmen; of week-days pent up in lath
and plaster— tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.
How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

"But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the
water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will
content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under
the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They
must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without fall-
ing in. . . ."

Ishmael leaves New York for New Bedford, arrives at night,
and seeks an inn. Since he is low in funds, he seeks the cheapest
inns, which are nearest the water-front, and his approach to water
204

is represented as an approach to chaos, death, and hell. Ishmael
proceeds through dismal streets, stumbles into a negro church,
and then comes to The Spouter Inn, kept by Peter Coffin, a jux-
taposition of names which gives us our first explicit hint of one
of the two major symbolisms of the whale: death and evil. And
in the third chapter, we are given a clue to both meanings, for
the sailors' bar is over-arched by the jawbone of a whale; the
symbolism of this passage is clear, and the description is horribly
vivid:

"Entering that gable-ended Spouter Inn, you found yourself
in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, re-
minding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. . . .

"The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a
heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were
thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others
were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped,
with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the
new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you
gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could
ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrify-
ing implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances
and harpoons all broken and deformed. . . .

"Crossing this dusty entry, and on through yon low-arched
way— cut through what in old times must have been a great cen-
tral chimney with fire-places all round— you enter the public
room. A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams
above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would
almost fancy you trod some old craft's cockpits, especially of such
a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so
furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered
with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from
this wide world's remotest nooks. Projecting from the farther
angle of the room stands a dark-looking den— the bar— a rude
attempt at a right whale's head. Be that how it may, there stands
the vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide a coach might
almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round
with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift de-

205

struction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they
call him) bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money,
dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death."

It is at this inn that Ishmael meets his future boon-companion,
Queequeg, a tattooed cannibal, whose head, in the half-light, re-
sembles a mildewed skull. The harpooneers on the voyage all
turn out to be savages: the first three, Queequeg, the Pacific
islander, Daggoo, the African negro, and Tashtego the Gay Head
Indian, represent the basic pagan virtues of strength and accu-
racy, both muscular and instinctive, and of absolute fidelity, but
below the level of reason, so that they are governed unquestion-
ingly by the damned Ahab and do his bidding to the end: when
the ship finally sinks to perdition, Tashtego is nailing a sky-hawk,
a piece of heaven, to the mast, to carry it down with him.

After a few minor adventures, Ishmael finds his way to Father
Mapple's church, inspects the memorial tablets for whalemen
lost at sea, and speculates on the horrible implications of death,
especially upon the universal and ineradicable feeling among
men that death is essentially and profoundly evil. The reasoning
implied here is the same as that developed fully in the great chap-
ter on the whiteness of the whale; namely, that this instinctive
knowledge of evil and demonism is trustworthy and is embedded
in the race as a remnant of an earlier and fuller knowledge: "In
what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance,
yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how
is it that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we never-
theless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the
living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of
the knocking of a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things
are not without their meanings/'

Father Mapple preaches on Jonah, and the whale is the symbol
of hell and death. The hymn contains the essence of the sermon:

The ribs and terrors of the whale,

Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all Gods sunlit waves rolled \>yy

And left me deepening down to doom.

206

1 saw the opening maw of hell,

With endless pains and sorrows there;

Which none hut they that feel can tell—
Oh, I was plunging to despair.

In hlack distress, 1 called my God,

When I could scarce believe him mine,

He howed his ear to my complaints-
No more the whale did me confine.

With speed he flew to my relief,

As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright as lightning, shone

The face of my Deliverer God.

My song forever shall record

That terrible that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,

His all the mercy and the power.

Jonah, having sinned, is given a foretaste of hell, and then he
repents, and God delivers him; "and Jonah, bruised and beaten
—his ears, like two seashells, still multitudinously murmuring
of the ocean— Jonah did the Almighty's bidding." But so Ahab
did not, and Ahab was damned.

They proceed a little farther to sea; that is, to the island of
Nantucket, from which they plan to ship. Nantucket is repre-
sented as the very essence of the New England sea-coast, the
fishiest of fishing towns. Ishmael is excited with his coming ad-
venture, and the cod and clam chowders of Mistress Hussey
render him momentarily delirious: "But look, Queequeg, ain't
that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?" Even the
landlord's cow appears a trifle tipsy: "I saw Hosea's brindled
cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with
each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slipshod, I
assure ye."

Ishmael and Queequeg sign to ship on the Pequod, a Nan-

207

tucket whaler commanded by Captain Ahab, and of which the
retired captains Peleg and Bildad are part owners. Queequeg's
island divinity, whom he carries about with him, had communi-
cated to Queequeg that Ishmael was fated to choose the boat on
which they were fated to sail, and thus was the matter done. Im-
mediately after signing, they receive a warning from Bildad:
"Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing
Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge
pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts,
and selecting one entitled, The Latter Day Coming; or No Time
to Lose/ placed it in Queequeg's hands, and then grasping them
and the book in both his, looked earnestly into his eyes, and said,
'Son of darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of
this ship and feel concerned for the souls of all its crew; if thou
still clingest to thy pagan ways, which I sadly fear, I beseech thee,
remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell, and
the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye,
I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!' " The
grotesque combination of the familiar and the terrible in this
passage is due to the fact that a common and somewhat ludicrous
man and action are utilized to recall symbolic meanings of which
the actors are unaware but which the reader supposedly has
fathomed. The ominous humor of other scenes in the early parts
of the book, especially that relating to the two inns and the first
meeting with Queequeg, is of the same kind. Bildad's outburst,
like Father Mapple's sermon, is one of the many unheeded warn-
ings with which the progress of the book is marked.

After they set sail, the mates are introduced and described.
They represent various levels of normal human attitudes toward
physical and spiritual danger, the highest being that of Starbuck,
the first mate, who represents the critical intelligence: "Starbuck
was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment;
but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all
mortally practical occasions. . . . For, thought Starbuck, I am
here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to
be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been
so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father's?
208

Where in the bottomless deeps could he find the torn limbs of his
brother?" Starbuck's desperate effort to turn Ahab from his pur-
pose, and, after his failure, his submission to Ahab, is thus a
major crisis in the book; it represents the unsuccessful rebellion
of sanity and morality against a dominant madness.

Ahab himself has lost a leg to Moby Dick, the white whale, on
a previous voyage, and has set out on this voyage with the secret
intention of vengeance, in spite of the fact that he owes a pri-
mary allegiance to the interests of his owners. As the whale repre-
sents death and evil, Ahab's ivory leg represents the death that
has become a part of the living man as a result of his struggle
with evil; it is the numb wisdom which is the fruit of experience.
Stubb displeases Ahab and dreams that Ahab kicks him with the
ivory leg; Stubb meditates vengeance, but he eventually con-
cludes that it is an honor to be kicked by the ivory leg of a great
man, When Ahab meets another captain at sea who has an ivory
right arm as a result of a similar accident, and when the captain
in question extends his dead arm in greeting, Ahab hoists his
ivory leg and crosses the arm with it.

Although these Nantucket sea-otticers are nominally Quakers,
they have more of the Calvinist in their make-up than of the
Friend, and Melville treats them in more or less Calvinistic
terms; they are, says Melville, "Quakers with a vengeance." The
Calvinist, though he believes that every phenomenon in the uni-
verse is decreed by God, though he believes that good works are
of no value toward salvation, yet believes, sometimes as a theolo-
gian, sometimes merely as a practitioner of traditional modes of
speech who is too uncritical to be aware of discrepancies, that
man is morally responsible to God; and, if he is wise enough
not to attempt to resolve this contradiction, having once discov-
ered it, consigns it to the plane of Absolute Understanding, eter-
nally unattainable by man. Jonathan Edwards elaborates this
somewhat by separating, in effect, the predestined and sinning
will from the understanding soul; so that the soul, conceived
for the moment as pure understanding, may observe its own
actions, which it cannot avoid committing, and approve its own
damnation. It is in some such terms as these that Ahab is con-

209

ceived. There are many passages in the book indicating the
theme of predestination; the most striking occur in the forty-
ninth chapter:

". . . it almost seemed that while he himself was marking
out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pen-
cil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked
chart of his forehead. . . .

"Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and
intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own
intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clash-
ing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his
blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became in-
sufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these
spiritual throes in him heaved its being up from its base, and a
chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and
lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap
down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath
him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glar-
ing eyes Ahalb would burst from his stateroom, as though escap-
ing from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of
being the insuppressible symptoms of some latent weakness, or
fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its in-
tensity. For at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappcas-
edly steadfast hunter of the White Whale; this Ahab that had
gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to
burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living
principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissoci-
ated from the characterizing mind, which at other times em-
ployed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought
escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of
which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind
does not exist, unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must
have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and
fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose by its own sheer
inveteracy of will forced itself against gods and devils into a
kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could
grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was
210

conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfa-
thered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of
bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was
for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic
being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to
color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man,
thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose in-
tense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds
upon his heart forever; that vulture the very creature he creates/'

Considered in this light, Fedallah, Ahab's harpooneer, who
guides and advises him in the direction of his undoing, and who,
according to Melville's own suggestion, may be some kind of
emanation from Ahab himself, is perhaps the sinning mind as
it shows itself distinct from the whole man. Fedallah and his
boat-crew are smuggled on board and concealed until the ship
is in mid-ocean and Ahab's intention is disclosed; they are seen
in Nantuckct only as ghostly figures hurrying toward the ship
in the dawn, at a time when there arc the vaguest of rumors
afloat about Ahab; Fedallah is destined to die before Ahab; it is
Fedallah, moreover, who sights the spirit-spout, which guides the
ship into the Pacific. The crew regard Fedallah as the devil in
disguise, and he appears in general to be offered as a manifesta-
tion of pure evil. His relationship to Ahab is underlined at
the end of the seventy-third chapter: "Meantime Fedallah was
calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever and anon glanc-
ing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand.
And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his
shadow; while if the Parsee's shadow was there at all, it seemed
only to blend with and lengthen Ahab's. As the crew toiled on,
Laplandish speculations were bandied among them, concerning
all these passing things."

But predestined or otherwise, it is with Ahab the sinner that
the book is concerned; his sin, in the minor sense, is monomaniac
vengeance; in the major, the will to destroy the spirit of evil it-
self, an intention blasphemous because beyond human powers
and infringing upon the purposes of God. After Starbuck tries
and fails to turn Ahab aside, we have a series of chapters illus-

211

trating the effect of this action on the voyage. The first is a mono-
logue spoken by Ahab:

"Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise
nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely
light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I
can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low,
enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly!
damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night— good night!

" 'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn at
the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various
wheels, and they revolve. . . . They think me mad— Starbuck
does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! The wild
madness that's only calm to comprehend itself!"

The next monologue is spoken by Starbuck: "My soul is more
than matched; she's overmanned; and by a madman! Insuffer-
able sting that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But
he drilled deep down and blasted all my reason out of me! . . .
Oh God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch
of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish
sea. The White Whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal
orgies!"

There follows a brief monologue by Stubb, the imperceptive,
the porter at the gate, and then comes the scene of the "infernal
orgies" in the forecastle, in which, as a result of the defeat of
Starbuck, who represents reason, the brutal instincts of the crew
are progressively loosened, until, on the brink of catastrophe,
they are brought to order by the need of coping with a physical
adversary, a rising storm. From this time forward, however, the
ship is in Ahab's hands; he ultimately destroys his nautical in-
struments and sails by instinct until he finds the whale in the
remote Pacific and is destroyed.

The symbolism of the whale is part of the symbolism of the
sea. The sea is the realm of the half-known, at once of percep-
tion and of peril; it is infested by subtle and malignant creatures,
bent on destruction; it is governed by tremendous, destructive,
and unpredictable forces, the storms, calms, currents, tides,
depths, and distances, amid which one can preserve oneself by
212

virtue only of the greatest skill, and then but precariously and
from moment to moment. Of all the creatures in the sea, the
whale is the greatest, the most intelligent, and the most danger-
ous. It is for whalemen the chief object in life upon the sea; it
lures them to sea; it brings them frequently to death; they are of
necessity much impressed with its dangers and its power. It is
thus naturally, in a general way, the symbol of evil and of death,
and this symbolism is developed from beginning to end of the
book carefully and elaborately; it is especially explicit in the de-
scription of the skeleton whale which Ishmael once saw in a
bower in the ArsacideS. The description of the skeleton follows
a great many other chapters in which the anatomy of the whale
is treated part by part: one is familiarized in great detail with the
structure, size, and functions of the animal, as well as with his
habits, and with the stupendous medium in which he moves.
Probably no other book exists which so impresses us at once with
the vastness of the physical universe and with the vastness of the
idea of the universe. The allegory is incalculably strengthened by
this sense of vastness and power, and by the detailed reality
through which it is established. Ultimately we are shown the
extent of time which the whale inhabits, as well as of space; we
meet the fossil whale; and we see how the idea of the whale is
imbedded in all nature, for his physical form is repeatedly sug-
gested in rocks, in mountains, and in stars.

This general symbolism is concentrated in Moby Dick, the
White Whale, who is especially intelligent, malignant, and pow-
erful; who has destroyed or seriously injured every whaler who
has sought to kill him, and who has become among whalemen
a more or less legendary figure. In an earlier encounter, he had
bitten off Ahab's leg; Ahab is bent on vengeance. This intense
desire for revenge is a sin; and in Ahab's case the sin is height-
ened by the conviction that a power greater and more malignant
than any proper to mere animal nature is acting in or through
the whale: he is convinced of the true existence of the "demon-
ism of the world." He thus endeavors to step outside of the limita-
tions of man and revenge himself upon the permanent order
of the universe; as Melville says, in a passage already quoted, he

213

is Promethean, in that he defies the gods; but he goes beyond
Prometheus in his fury, for he seeks to destroy a god. He repre-
sents, essentially, the ultimate distillation of the Calvinistic tem-
perament.

" 'Vengeance on a dumb brute!' cried Starbuck, 'that simply
smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with
a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous/

" 'Hark ye yet again— the little lower layer. All visible objects,
man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event— in the liv-
ing act, the undoubted deed— there, some unknown but still
reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from be-
hind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through
the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrust-
ing through the wall? To me the white whale is that wall,
shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond.
But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him out-
rageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That
inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale
agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate
upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun
if it insulted me/ "

The most extensive elucidation and defense of the notion of
the demonism of Moby Dick, as well as of "the demonism of
the world," occurs in the chapter on the whiteness of the whale,
equally one of the most astonishing pieces of rhetoric and one
of the most appalling specimens of metaphysical argument in all
literature:

"Tell me why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful
valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey— why is
it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo
robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells
its wild animal muskiness— why will he start, snort, and with
bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is
no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his
green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells
cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of
214

former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of
the black bisons of distant Oregon?

"No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the in-
stinct of the knowledge of the demonism of the world. Though
thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage
musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the
deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may
be trampling into dust.

"Thus, then, the muffled rollings of the milky sea; the bleak
rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shift-
ings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael,
are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!

"Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of
which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as
with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in
many of its aspects, this visible world seems formed in love, the
invisible spheres were formed in fright.

"But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness,
and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and
more strange and far more portentous— why, as we have seen,
it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay,
the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is,
the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

"Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless
voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from
behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the
depths of the milky way? Or is it that in essence whiteness is not
so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same
time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there
is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape
of snows— a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
And when we consider that other theory of the natural philoso-
phers, that all other earthly hues— every stately or lovely embla-
zoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the
gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young
girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in

215

substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified
nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover
nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed fur-
ther, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces
every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever re-
mains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without me-
dium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses,
with its own blank tinge— pondering all this, the palsied universe
lies before us a leper; and like wilfull travellers in Lapland, who
refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so
the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all
these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then
at the fiery hunt?"

Through elaborate and magnificent physical description we
are made to realize the tremendousness of the whale and of his
medium; through exposition of this nature, we are shown his
spiritual significance. It is not that one object stands for another,
as a bare allegorical formula; the relationship is more fully and
subtly developed in the book than one can develop it in sum-
mary. The possibility that the physical and the spiritual are one
and the same, according to the terms employed, is established;
and one is convinced, with Ahab, for the time being, of the prob-
ability in this instance. Or if one is not, one is brought to an
understanding of Ahab's conviction; so that his entire course of
action becomes, in its spiritual effect, what it was for him in
literal fact, a defiance of the divine order.

The union of the physical and the spiritual is at all times im-
pressive in this narrative; it reaches, in two descriptions of Moby
Dick himself, a sublimity and terror probably never surpassed in
literature, and but seldom equalled. The first, and slighter, is the
description of the spirit-spout, which -lured Ahab into the far
Pacific:

"It was while gliding through these latter waters that one
serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like
scrolls of silver; and, by their soft suffusing seethings, made what
seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a
216

silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the
bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some
plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first
descried this jet. For of these moonlit nights, it was his wont to
mount to the mainmast head, and stand a look-out there, with
the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds
of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred
would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what
emotions, then, the seamen beheld this Oriental perched aloft
at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in
one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there
for several successive nights without uttering a single sound;
when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard an-
nouncing that silvery moonlit jet, every reclining mariner started
to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging,
and hailed the mortal crew/'

The second is the description of Moby Dick near the close of
the book, when he is actually sighted by daylight for the first
time:

"Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through
the sea; but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him,
the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over
its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At
length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsus-
pecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible,
sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set
in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the
vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond.
Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the
glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musi-
cal rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the
blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley
of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles rose and
danced by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes
of hundreds of gay fowls softly feathering the sea, alternate with
their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the
painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent

217

lance projected from the White Whale's back; and at intervals
one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skim-
ming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on
this pole, the long tail-feathers streaming like pennons.

"A gentle joyousness, a mighty mildness of repose in swift-
ness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter
swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful
horns; his lovely leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid;
with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nup-
tial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that mighty majesty Supreme!
did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.

"On each soft side— coincident with the parted swell, that but
once leaving him, then flowed so wide away— on each bright
side, the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been
some among the hunters who namelessly transported and al-
lured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally
found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, en-
ticing calm, oh whale! thou glidest on, to all who for the first
time eye thee,. no matter how many in that same way thou may'st
have bejuggled and destroyed before.

"And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical
sea, among waves whose handclappings were suspended by ex-
ceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from
sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the
wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him
slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized
body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and
warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god
revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly
halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly
lingered over the agitated pool that he left/'

We have now the main outline of the plot and symbolism of
the book; with these in mind, the reader can readily distinguish
the significance of the smaller details.

The book has more or less defied classification, yet chiefly be-
cause it fuses categories in the matter of structure, so as to pro-
duce a new structure, and because it is long and complex and
218

has been imperfectly studied: it is beyond a cavil one of the most
carefully and successfully constructed of all the major works of
literature; to find it careless, redundant, or in any sense romantic,
as even its professed admirers are prone to do, is merely to mis-
read the book and to be ignorant of the history leading up to it.
The book is less a novel than an epic poem. The plot is too
immediately interpenetrated with idea to lend itself easily to the
manner of the novelist. The language in which it is written is
closer to the poetry of Paradise Lost or of Hamlet than it is to
the prose of the realistic novelist. The extremes of prosaic and
of poetic language, each at a high level of excellence, might be
illustrated by the prose of The Age of Innocence, on the one
hand, and by one of the best sonnets of Shakespeare on the
other: the extreme of prose is the recounting of individual facts;
the extreme of poetry is the lyrical, in the best sense; that is, the
expository concentration of a motivating concept, in language
such that motivating concept and motivated feeling are expressed
simultaneously and in brief space. Between these extremes, but
a little nearer to the sonnet than to Mrs. Wharton, is the lan-
guage of the great epic or dramatic poem: in Macbeth, or in
Paradise Lost, the individual passage is never self-sustaining in
the same measure as the poetry of the great sonnet by either
author; even the greatest passages are dependent upon the struc-
ture and upon the total theme for their greatness, and must be
read in their context if they are not to seem inferior in quality to
the shorter poems. This does not mean that they are an inferior
kind of poetry; it means that they are a different kind of poetry.
In the prose of Moby Dick, this difference in texture is carried
a little farther, but only a very little. The prose, of Moby Dick,
though mechanically it is prose and not verse— except for those
passages where it occasionally falls fragmentarily into iambic
pentameter— is by virtue of its elaborate rhythms and heightened
rhetoric closer in its aesthetic result to the poetry of Paradise Lost
than to the prose of Mrs. Wharton. The instrument, as an in-
vention, and even when we are familiar with the great prose of
the seventeenth century as its background, is essentially as origi-
nal and powerful an invention as the blank verse of Milton. On

219

the whole, we may fairly regard the work as essentially a poetic
performance.

If we so regard it, however— that is, if we regard it as an epic
poem— we must mark another exception. Except in Paradise
Lost, that other great masterpiece of more or less Calvinistic
literature— the epic hero is normally a successful figure, and not
a tragical one; Ahab, on the other hand, obeys the traditional law
of tragedy, and destroys himself through allowing himself to be
dominated by an heroic vice: he is another Coriolanus, but in
dimensions epical, in the quality of his mind and of his sin meta-
physical, and in his motivating ideas Calvinistical. One should
note that Melville, in writing a tragic instead of a traditionally
heroic epic, displayed a thorough understanding of his material :
the Calvinistic view led to sin and catastrophe, not to triumph,
although at times to sin and catastrophe on an inspired and heroic
scale; Ahab is the magnificent fruition of Maule's curse. Melville,
on the other hand, escaped the curse by comprehending it.

The book, then, partakes in some measure of the qualities of
a novel and of a tragic drama; but essentially it is an epic poem.
Form and subject are mastered with a success equal to that ob-
servable in Milton, Vergil, or Shakespeare.

The book is not only a great epic; it is profoundly an Ameri-
can epic. It is easy to exaggerate the importance of nationalism in
literature, but in this particular case, the nationalism is the his-
torical element, and not to perceive it is to fail to understand the
very subject of the book. In its physical events, Moby Dick is a
narration of exploration and heroic adventure; it is thus typical
of the United States of the nineteenth century, by land as well
as by sea: "They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Explor-
ing Expeditions, your Cookes, your Krusensterns; but I say that
scores of anonymous captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that
were as great and greater than your Cooke and your Krusenstern.
For in their succorless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish
sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded javelin islands,
battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his
marines and muskets would not have willingly dared/'

The adventure, in its physical aspects, is of New England and

220

hence by sea; the original New Englanders, indeed, two cen-
turies earlier, had adventured by sea into a virgin wilderness, be-
lieving themselves led by God, and there had wrestled with the
Wonders of the Invisible World. The fusion of the physical with
the spiritual in New England is older than Melville; the New
Englanders of whom Melville wrote were descended from the
Mathers and their townsmen, from the contemporaries of the
more recent Jonathan Edwards, men who saw chimneys suddenly
leap into flame in the midst of a revival sermon, upon whom a
church might fall, immediately following a preacher's prophecy
of doom. With physical and spiritual adventure alike, and with
the two interpenetrative, the New Englanders were familiar from
childhood, had even been familiar for generations, so that Mel-
ville but spoke the literal truth of his representative New Eng-
landers, those of Nantucket, when he spoke with double meaning
of their adventures at sea: 'The Nantucketer, he alone resides
and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it
in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.
There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood
would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in
China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he
hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb
the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes
to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the
moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at
sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so
at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails,
and lays him to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of
walruses and whales."

ii

The greatest works of Melville, aside from Moby Dick, and
contrary to the popular view, are among those which follow, not
among those which precede it. They are Benito Cereno, The

221

Encantadas, and Billy Budd. These works, in the matter of style,
are essentially prose; The Encantadas contains traces of the style
of Moby Dick, along with traces of its subject-matter, but the
rhetoric is subdued in structure and in feeling. In Benito Cereno,
and in the other later works, there is scarcely a trace of the style
of Moby Dick; we have the style of a novelist, and in Benito
Cereno especially this style occurs in a form both classical and
austere.

The subject matter of the first two of the later masterpieces
may be briefly defined: In Benito Cereno, the Spanish sea-
captain of that name takes insufficient precautions in the trans-
porting of a ship-load of negro slaves belonging to a friend; the
slaves mutiny, kill most of the crew, and enslave the remainder,
including the captain. When Cereno is finally rescued by Cap-
tain Delano, he is broken in spirit, and says that he can return
home but to die. When Captain Delano inquires what has cast
such a shadow upon him, he answers: "The negro/' His reply in
Spanish would have signified not only the negro, or the black
man, but by% metaphorical extension the basic evil in human
nature. The morality of slavery is not an issue in this story; the
issue is this, that through a series of acts of performance and of
negligence, the fundamental evil of a group of men, evil which
normally should have been kept in abeyance, was freed to act.
The story is a portrait of that evil in action, as shown in the
negroes, and of the effect of the action, as shown in Cereno. It is
appalling in its completeness, in its subtle horror, and in its silky
quiet.

In The Encantadas, we have a series of ten sketches, descrip-
tive of the Galdpagos Islands. These islands, as described by Mel-
ville, are more of the sea, as the sea appears in Moby Dick, than
is any other land. In the first place they are so surrounded by
treacherous calms and ocean currents, that for many years their
exact location was wrongly charted, two groups of islands at a
considerable distance apart having been charted instead of one:
it was this mysterious quality which gave them their early name,
The Enchanted Islands. Further, of all land they are the most
barren, according to Melville, and the most hostile to human life :
222

they are inhabited only by reptiles and by seabirds, and one or
two of them by the most desperate and debased of human rene-
gades.

Melville's descriptive power in this series is at its best; the
islands in all their barren and archaic horror are realized unfor-
gettably. The climax of the series is the account of Hunilla, the
Chola, who went to the islands with her husband and her brother
to gather turtle oil, much as the Nantucketers went to sea for
the oil of the whale. Her husband and her brother were drowned
while fishing. The ship that left them did not return. She was
ravished by the boat-crews of two whalers and left behind by
them, and was ultimately rescued and returned to Peru by the
ship of which Melville was one of the seamen. She was thus a
victim of the sea; that is, of brute chance and brutal malice,
forces over which she had no control, and in the face of which
the only supporting virtues were absolute humility and absolute
fortitude: "The last seen of the lone Hunilla she was passing into
Payta town, riding upon a small gray ass; and before her on the
ass's shoulders, she eyed the jointed workings of the beast's
armorial cross."

The subject of Billy Budd may best be considered after a short
account of Pierre and The Confidence Man, the two works which
in reality, though unsuccessful, do more to clarify Melville's total
work than any book save Moby Dick, and which have above all
others left his critics in the most abysmal confusion.

The plot of Pierre, or The Ambiguities may be summarized
briefly thus: Pierre Glendinning, the son of a wealthy and aristo-
cratic New York family, discovers that he has an illegitimate
half-sister the daughter of his father and of a young French girl.
This is a severe shock, for he had revered his father's memory
deeply. The sister, Isabel, is without friends or funds. Pierre feels
morally bound to help her in some manner, and also in some way
to acknowledge her, to unite his life to hers, yet he knows that to
acknowledge her as a sister will blight his mother's life. Hence,
though he is engaged to marry Lucy Tartan, he announces
to Lucy and his mother that he and Isabel have been secretly
married, and he takes Isabel to New York, and tries to support

223

himself by his pen. His mother disowns and disinherits him.
Lucy is prostrated, but recovers and follows Pierre to New York,
where she joins the household under the guise of a cousin. She
is pursued by her brother and by Pierre's cousin, who has sup-
planted Pierre as the Glendinning heir. Pierre kills the cousin;
Lucy dies of shock and Pierre and Isabel commit suicide in
Pierre's prison cell.

Now despite the difference in plot and in subject matter, the
idea of this book is the same as that governing Moby Dick, but
with a shift in emphasis: it is the relationship of principle to per-
ception, and the difficulty of adjusting principle to perception in
such a manner as to permit a judgment which shall be a valid
motive to action. In Moby Dick, Melville assumed that such
judgment, though difficult, was possible; Ahab sinned by disre-
garding the counsel of Starbuck (the critical intellect), by de-
stroying his nautical instruments, with the aid of which he main-
tained his position while at sea (that is, in the half-known) with
relation to the land (the known), and by committing himself
to his own unaided instincts. In Pierre and in The Confidence
Man alike it is assumed that valid judgment is impossible, for
every event, every fact, every person, is too fluid, too unbounded
to be known:

"If among the deeper significances of its pervading indefinite-
ness/' he says in Pierre> "which significances are wisely hidden
from all but the rarest adepts, the pregnant tragedy of Hamlet
convey any one particular moral at all fitted to the ordinary uses
of man, it is this: —that all meditation is worthless, unless it
prompt to action; that it is not for man to stand shilly-shallying
amid the conflicting invasions of surrounding impulses; that in
the earliest instant of conviction, the roused man must strike,
and, if possible, with the precision and force of the lightning
bolt."

This is obviously the counsel of the despairing moralist; briefly,
it may be reduced to this advice: act quickly, for if you give your-
self time to reconsider, you will be unable to act. Pierre acts— he
surely cannot be accused of moral paralysis—but he acts hastily
and on unsound principles; he is convinced that the world is one
of moral confusion, and he proceeds in confusion; intellectually,

if not emotionally, he is satisfied with confusion; and for the time
being his author is at one with him in this respect. The following
passage from Pierre recalls, in its governing idea, the invocation
to Bulkington, but again with the change of emphasis charac-
teristic of the later work:

"As the vine flourishes, as the grape empurples, close up to the
very walls and muzzles of cannoned Ehrenbreitstein; so do the
sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.

"But is life, indeed, a thing for all infidel levities, and we, its
misdeemed beneficiaries, so utterly fools and infatuate, that what
we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the
caprice of the minutest event— the falling of a leaf, the hearing of
a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with
a few small characters by a sharpened feather?"

The substance of this passage is this: that our safety is mo-
mentary and precarious; but that there is no trustworthy pre-
caution that we can take against evil. It thus resembles the invo-
cation to Bulkington in its general proposition, but differs from
it, in that the present passage would imply that Bulkington's
efforts were unavailing.

Isabel, similarly, after telling how she gradually regained a
normal attitude after being removed from the madhouse at the
age of nine or ten, and being placed with a friendly family, re-
marks: "I cannot speak coherently here; but somehow I felt that
all good harmless men and women were human things, placed
at cross-purposes, in a world of snakes and lightnings, in a world
of horrible and inscrutable inhumanities/'

There are in the plot of Pierre, two situations in particular,
the two central issues of the book, which are intended to illus-
trate the ambiguity of all supposed morality. One is the double
image of his father: that of the father remembered and repre-
sented by the portrait painted after his marriage; and that of the
young rake who begot Isabel, whose existence was suddenly dis-
closed to Pierre, and who is represented by the portrait painted
when he was visiting Isabel's mother. Between the extremes of
the two portraits Pierre's judgment of his father blurs and shifts
and cannot be fixed; it is this difficulty that disturbed Pierre to

225

the extent that he precipitately projected himself into the rela-
tionship with Isabel. This relationship provides the second am-
biguity, for though at the time of his action Pierre believed that
he was acting wholly for moral and generous reasons, he dis-
covered immediately after acting that he was the victim of an
incestuous passion for Isabel, so that he learns to distrust his own
motives. At the conclusion of the book, the author confronts the
reader with a final ambiguity, the problem of judging Pierre:
" 'All's over and ye know him not!' came gasping from the wall;
and from the fingers of Isabel dropped an empty vial— as it had
been a run-out sand-glass— and shivered upon the floor; and her
whole form sloped sideways, and she fell upon Pierre's heart,
and her long hair ran over him and arbored him in ebon vines."

The lecture of Plotinus Plinlimmon on clocks and chronom-
eters, which falls into Pierre's hands as a kind of warning, teaches
that we should establish a working compromise between absolute
and worldly truth, if we are not to destroy ourselves. This also
is the moral of Moby Dick: the need of recognizing not only
man's aspirations, but his limitations. Pierre, however, like Ahab,
lacks humility; unlike Ahab, he is not seen by his author in per-
spective—that is, Melville agrees with him: 'In those Hyper-
borean regions, to which enthusiastic Truth, and Earnestness,
and Independence, will invariably lead a mind fitted by nature
for profound and fearless thoughts, all objects are seen in a
dubious, uncertain, and refracting light. Viewed through that
rarified atmosphere the most immemorially admitted maxims of
men begin to slide and fluctuate, and finally become wholly in-
verted; the very heavens themselves being not innocent of pro-
ducing this confounding effect, since it is mostly in the heavens
themselves that these wonderful mirages are exhibited.

"But the example of many minds forever lost, like undiscov-
erable arctic explorers, amid those treacherous regions, warns us
entirely away from them; and we learn that it is not for man to
follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses
the directing compass of his mind; for arrived at the Pole, to
whose barrenness only it points, there, the needle indifferently
respects all points of the horizon alike."
226

This morality is that of the book: that the final truth is abso-
lute ambiguity, and that nothing can be judged. It frustrates all
action, including that of the artist and that of the critic. We are
explicitly informed that we cannot judge Pierre; the essence of
Pierre is that he can judge nothing and that all his actions derive
from confusion and end in it. It is small wonder that a book com-
posed in this temporary twilight should have been so unsatisfac-
tory as a whole and in detail; for a work of art, like each detail
comprising it, is by definition a judgment. The prose of Pierre
is excited and inflated; it contains brilliant passages, but in the
main is a bad compromise between the prose of Moby Dick and
the prose of the novelist.

The theme of The Confidence Man is identical; the details of
the action are very different. The action takes place on a Missis-
sippi River steamer, aboard which a confidence man, a scoundrel
of metaphysical abilities and curiosity, operates partly for profit
and partly for malicious enjoyment. He appears in various dis-
guises: as the deaf mute in cream-colored clothes; as the negro
cripple; as the man in mourning; as the man in the gray coat
and the white tie; as the President of the Black Rapids Coal Com-
pany; as the herb doctor; as "the man with the brass plate/' or the
representative of the Philosophical Intelligence Office; and as the
cosmopolitan.

In each avatar, the Confidence Man tries to beguile his fellow-
travelers into feeling enough confidence in him to give him
money; that is, to form a judgment on which they are willing to
act. It should be noted, of course, that if they do so, they are
hoodwinked. The word confidence recurs repeatedly, and is the
key-word of the allegory.

In the third chapter, after the man with the wooden leg (a
major disseminator of distrust) has nearly started a riot against
the crippled negro, the Methodist Minister moves to the center
of things, gives the man with the wooden leg a beating, and ad-
dresses the crowd:

"Oh friends, oh beloved, how are we admonished by the mel-
ancholy spectacle of this raver. Let us profit by the lesson; and
is it not this: that if, next to mistrusting Providence, there be

227

ought that a man should pray against, it is against mistrusting
his fellow-man. I have been in mad-houses full of tragic mopers,
and seen there the end of suspicion : the cynic, in the moody mad-
ness muttering in the corner; for years a barren fixture there;
head lopped over, gnawing his own lip, vulture of himself; while
by fits and starts from the opposite corner came the grimaces of
the idiot at him/'

This sounds well, till we remember the context; the minister,
in avoiding the madhouse, becomes a dupe. This antithesis alone,
or the escape into deliberate hypocrisy, is all that Melville will
allow in this book; the possibility of the reasonable skepticism of
the cautious and critical man, as a prelude to a judgment at least
practically usable, he will not admit.

The man in the gray coat and the white tie is trying to restore
the confidence of the young minister (not the Methodist Minis-
ter) in the old negro, when they encounter the man with the
wooden leg, who laughs insanely and tells an anecdote casting
ridicule on confidence. The man with the wooden leg claims that
the negro is a%white imposter. The man with the gray coat and
the white tie says:

" Tell me, sir, do you really think that a white could look the
negro so? For one, I should call it pretty good acting/

" 'Not much better than any other man acts/

" 'How? Does all the world act? Am I, for instance, an actor?
Is my reverend friend here, too, a performer?'

" Tes, don't you both perform acts? To do is to act; so all doers
are actors/ "

The effect of this passage is as follows: to perform an action
is to have confidence in the motivating judgment. But no man
save a hypocrite can profess to have such confidence. Hence a
"doer" is an "actor/'

The most amusing illustration of the theme is the story of the
Indian hater, with its attendant and philosophical theory of
Indian-hating. The Indian, in this legend, represents the man
or fact to be judged and so trusted or suspected; if trusted, he
is necessarily untrustworthy, in accordance with the doctrine, for
it is impossible to obtain knowledge adequate for a sound judg-
228

ment. The Indian-hater is one who trusts no Indian, but spends
his life in the woods killing every Indian he meets. But most
Indian-haters are imperfect; sometimes one will unaccountably
become lonely and trust an Indian at random and so meet his
end; others take frequent vacations and' return to their families.
Of these last, the narrator says: "For the diluted Indian hater,
although the vacations he permits himself impair the keeping of
his character, yet, it should not be overlooked that this is the
man who, by his very infirmity, enables us to form surmises,
however inadequate, of what Indian-hating in its perfection is/'
Henry Adams, I should imagine, is the most distinguished ex-
ample of the diluted Indian-hater in our literature.

The Confidence Man is unsatisfactory as philosophy and is
tediously repetitious as narrative; but the prose, unlike that of
Pierre, is crisp and hard, and in a few passages the comment is
brilliant. The incident of the mystic, Mark Winsome, and of his
disciple, the wealthy young merchant, who turns the mystical
doctrine to practical ends, is a very biting commentary on Em-
erson and on the practical implications of Emersonian philosophy.
Melville was in a kind of moral limbo when he wrote these
books, however, and they are essentially unsatisfactory, though
they display greater intellectual activity than such works as White
Jacket, Typee,. and Omoo, works which within their limits are
successful. His failure in the two, however, is in a sense a proof
of the seriousness with which he took his central problem of
moral navigation; he considered the problem in all its possibili-
ties, and with sufficient imaginative intensity to leave a fairly
complete record of his consideration behind him. The notion
advanced by Mumford and others, that these books come out of
a period of insanity, is as absurd as the notion of Weaver that
Pierre, if psychoanalyzed in the proper spirit, is autobiographi-
cal. Both theories, of course, may be correct, but there is no evi-
dence to support either that would be admitted in court by a
disinterested criminal judge; and furthermore, it is the relation-
ship of these books to his work that we must understand if we
desire to profit by his work— their relationship to his life is as
unprofitable as it is unfathomable.

229

Hawthorne finished his career in much the same limbo; Henry
Adams passed his entire career there, but not so far in. There is
more madness in The Sense of the Past, by Henry James, than
in either book, and far more in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Yet
none of these writers is insane; as a result, rather, of being in-
volved in historical processes beyond their own powers to under-
stand the processes and extricate themselves, they are guilty of
forms of literary procedure which isolate certain aspects of the
consciousness from the rest, thus producing, within the literary
form, an imperfect intelligence; which, however, if mistaken for
a perfect portrait and used as a model for imitation, may be a
step toward personal disintegration.

In the final masterpiece, Billy Budd, the most profound of the
later works, if not the best written— the prose, unfortunately,
shows a little structural awkwardness, the result of thirty years
of disuse— the problem posed in Pierre and The Confidence Man
received its answer. The plot is as follows: Billy Budd, a hand-
some young sailor on a British frigate, is accused to the captain
of conspiracy;* the accuser, Claggart, is constitutionally a mali-
cious and dishonest man, who perjures himself to gratify an ir-
rational dislike. Billy is called before the captain to meet the
accusation; he is young, strong, and a man of quick feeling, and
he is handicapped by an innocent mind and a bad stutter. His
muscles move quicker than his tongue; he strikes Claggart in the
head and kills him; he is tried and hanged.

The captain, Vere, is able to fathom the situation; from the
standpoint of purely private morality, he sympathizes with Billy.
But Billy, in striking Claggart under these conditions committed
a capital crime, and in killing him committed another, facts
which Billy knew perfectly; to free him would establish at least
a precedent for freeing the whole matter of criminal justice in
the navy to the caprices of private judgment; the men would be
likely to take advantage of it, to the damage of discipline. There
had, moreover, been serious riots in the navy but a short time
before. Vere can see only one solution to the situation: to act
according to established principle, which supports public order,
and, for the margin of difference between established principle

230

and the facts of the particular situation, to accept it as private
tragedy.

The solution, with certain modifications, is the solution of
Mrs. Wharton for the same moral problem as it was later posed
by Henry James; the moral principle, in the better works of
Mrs. Wharton, however, is usually incarnate in a code of man-
ners, and at times appears less defensible than in Billy Budd, be-
cause of the tendency observable in codes of manners to become
externalized and superficial, to become insulated from the prin-
ciples informing them with life. The solution, in terms as bald
and absolute as the terms of Melville, was likewise the solution
of Socrates. It is not every situation, of course, which admits of
a solution by virtue of so certain a reference to the "known":
there may be cases, as Henry James was later to demonstrate
almost to his own undoing, and as Melville asserted in Moby
Dick, in which the problem of moral navigation, though not in-
soluble, is a subtler one, in which the exact relevance of any single
principle is harder to establish, and in which there may appear
to be the claims of conflicting principles. The solution, however,
in the case of this story, and as a matter of general principle, is
at once unanswerable, dignified, and profound; the characteriza-
tion of Vere and of Claggart represents an insight worthy to be
the final achievement of so long and so great a life.

in

The other works which deserve discussion may now be con-
sidered very briefly. The first two, Typee and Omoo, are anec-
dotal narratives of personal adventure in the south seas. There is
no guiding theme; the prose has a freshness and loveliness that
at times put one inexplicably in mind of the verse of the early
Marlowe, but its virtues are minor and fragmentary. The next
work, Mardi, is a long allegorical narrative, with what purports
to be a south Pacific setting; it is the most ambitious work in
length and scope, aside from Moby Dick, and though scarcely
unified is extremely powerful.

Mardi falls into four parts; the opening chapters, in which the

protagonist tells of his life on a Pacific whaler; the subsequent
chapters, following his desertion, with a comrade, Jarl, in which
he describes the ocean as seen from an open boat, chapters rival-
ling in their description all save the finest descriptive passages in
Moby Dick; the chapters describing their life for some weeks on
a small island schooner which they overtake, manned only by
a native islander and his wife, this section containing the sharp-
est and most amusing characterization of island temperament
that Melville ever achieved; and the remainder and chief part of
the book, which deals with the imaginary and allegorical region
of Mardi. The allegory of the last part deals with the search for
the maiden Yillah, who appears to represent earthly happiness;
the narrator and searcher is pursued by Queen Hautia, who ap-
pears to represent sensual corruption, and who is inescapably
related in some mysterious fashion to Yillah, and by the sons of
a priest whom he slew early in the narrative to obtain temporary
possession of Yillah. We appear to have, then, the pursuit for
something approaching romantic love, with the flight at once
from romantic disillusionment (Hautia) and from the conse-
quences of one's own sins committed in the name of love. In
the search, the narrator and his companions visit all the realms of
Mardi, and observe every possible mode of life and government,
but they fail to find Yillah. The only one of the party who finds
happiness is the half-mad and embittered philosopher, Babbal-
anja, who is converted to Christianity on the way, and who
thereupon renounces the world.

The theme is immature and romantic, and many of the parts
are of small interest; yet many of the parts, within the limits of
their subject, possess extraordinary beauty, and had Melville
never developed beyond this point, it would have been necessary
to accord him one of the very highest places in romantic litera-
ture. The most extraordinary portion of the book is the series of
chapters, numbers seventy-one to eighty-five, inclusive, dealing
with the stay in Willamilla; they constitute the richest, and from
a rhetorical point of view the most powerfully moving, rhapsody
on romantic sensuousness with which I am acquainted. The
supper of Abrazza, toward the close, and the conversion of Bab-

232

balanja, though briefer, are at moments nearly as excellent. In
these passages, and elsewhere in the book, notably in the great
invocation to Kamehameha, in chapter sixty-eight, the epic prose
of Moby Dick is already highly developed.

In White-Jacket we have another anecdotal journal, of which
the high points are the account of Dr. Cuticle and his operation,
and the brief chapter entitled The Bay of All Beauties; in this
work, the romanticism has already begun to wane. Redburn,
published in the same year, and dealing with Melville's first
voyage, has similar virtues and limitations, and is perhaps more
consistently of interest. Israel Potter, the life of an American
patriot of the Revolutionary War, is one of the few great novels
of pure adventure in English; it comes after Moby Dick in point
of time, and probably surpasses all the works preceding Moby
Dick save, possibly, Mardi.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism

\^

have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled,
whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence)-whether much
that is glorious— whether all that is prof ound— does not spring from
disease of thought— from moods of mind exalted at the expense of
the general intellect."

— Eleanora

I AM ABOUT TO promulgate a heresy; namely, that E. A. Poe,
although he achieved, as his admirers have claimed, a remark-
able agreement between his theory and his practice, is exception-
ally bad in both. I am somewhat startled, moreover, to awaken to
the fact that this is a heresy, that those who object to Poe would
do well to establish their position now if ever. Poe has long passed
casually with me and with most of my friends as a bad writer
accidentally and temporarily popular; the fact of the matter is, of
course, that he has been pretty effectually established as a great
writer while we have been sleeping. The menace lies not, pri-
marily, in his impressionistic admirers among literary people, of
whom he still has some, even in England and in America, where
a familiarity with his language ought to render his crudity ob-
vious, for these individuals in the main do not make themselves
permanently very effective; it lies rather in the impressive body of
scholarship, beginning, perhaps, with Harrison, Woodberry, and
Stedman, and continuing down to such writers as Campbell,
Stovall, and Una Pope-Hennessy. Much of this scholarship is
primarily biographical, historical, and textual; but when a writer
is supported by a sufficient body of such scholarship, a very little
philosophical elucidation will suffice to establish him in the schol-
arly world as a writer whose greatness is self-evident. This fact is
made especially evident in the work of the two critics who come

closest to taking the position which I shall take: W. C. Brownell l
and especially Norman Foerster.2 Both approach the essential
issue; neither is able, or it may be that because of its absurdity
neither is willing, to define it; and both maintain the traditional
reverence for Poe as a stylist, a reverence which I believe to be
at once unjustified and a source of error in dealing with his
theory.

My consternation became acute upon the examination of a
recent edition of selections from Poe, prepared, it is true, merely
as a classroom text, but prepared with great competence, by a
respectable Poe scholar, the late Margaret Alterton, and by an
exceptionally distinguished scholar in the field of the English
Renaissance, Professor Hardin Craig.3 The Introduction to this
text, the first and second parts of which were written by Miss
Alterton and after her death revised by Professor Craig, the third
part of which was written wholly by Professor Craig, offers the
best general defense of Poe with which I am acquainted; it is
careful and thorough, and it makes as good a case for Poe, I
imagine, as can be made. And when one has finished it, one has
a perfectly clear idea of why it is wrong.

The problem is a simple one. Most of Poe's essential theory is
summarized in three essays: The Poetic Principle, The Philoso-
phy of Composition, and The Rationale of Verse. Important state-
ments can be found elsewhere, and I shall draw upon other
essays, but these essays contain most of the essential ideas. Fur-
thermore the essential statements recur repeatedly in other es-
says, frequently almost verbatim. By confining oneself largely to
these essays, by selecting the crucial statements, by showing as
briefly as possible their obvious relations one to another, one can
reduce Poe's aesthetic to a very brief and a perfectly accurate

1 W. C. Brownell, American Prose Masters (New York, 1909).

2 Norman Foerster, American Criticism (Boston and New York, 1928). I
should like, if I had time, to examine Professor Foerster's essay on Poe at
length, partly because of the similarities and the differences between his posi-
tion and my own, and pardy because of a matter largely irrelevant but none
the less astonishing— that is, Professor Foerster's view of the nature and history
of music, subjects of which he displays an ignorance nothing less than sweep-
ing.

3 Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Craig and Alterton (New York, 1935).

statement. In doing this, I shall endeavor in every case to inter-
pret what he says directly, not with the aid of other writers whose
theories may have influenced him and by aid of whose theories
one may conceivably be able to gloss over some of his confusion;
and I shall endeavor to show that this direct approach is fully
justified by his own artistic practice.

The passages which I shall quote have all been quoted many
times before; I shall have to beg indulgence on that score and
ask the reader to examine once and for all their obvious sig-
nificance.

Any study of Poe should begin with a statement made in con-
nection with Elizabeth Barretts A Drama of Exile. He says:
"This is emphatically the thinking age; indeed it may very well
be questioned whether man ever substantially thought before." 4
This sentence displays an ignorance at once of thought and of
the history of thought so comprehensive as to preclude the pos-
sibility of our surprise at any further disclosures. It helps to ex-
plain, furthermore, Poe's extraordinary inability to understand
even the poetry* of ages previous to his own, as well as his sub-
servience in matters of taste to the vulgar sentimentalism which
dominated the more popular poets of his period, such poets as
Moore, Hood, and Willis, to mention no others. One seldom en-
counters a writer so thoroughly at the mercy of contemporaneity.
Professor Foerster writes of him: "Of this sustaining power of the
past, it must be admitted, Poe himself had but a dim understand-
ing." And he quotes Professor Woodberry (Life, I, 132) as fol-
lows: "He had, in the narrowest sense, a contemporaneous mind,
the instincts of the journalist, the magazine writer." 5

ii

One cannot better introduce the question of Poe's aesthetics than
by his well-known remarks about Tennyson, in The Poetic Prin-
ciple: "In perfect sincerity, I regard him as the noblest poet that

*A11 quotations in this essay are from the edition of Stedman and Wood-
berry. Quotations from the criticism only are given footnotes. This quotation is
from Vol. I, page 294, of the three volumes of criticism.

5 Foerster, op. cit., pages 1 and 2.

236

ever lived. ... I call him and think him, the noblest of poets,
not because the impressions he produces are at all times the most
profound, not because the poetical excitement which he induces
is at all times the most intense, but because it is, at all times the
most ethereal,— in other words, the most elevating and the most
pure. No poet is so little of the earth, earthy." 6 The italics, of
course, here and elsewhere are Poe's; it is seldom necessary to im-
prove upon Poe in this respect. Our task will be primarily to find
out what this passage means. I believe that I shall be able to show
that it means this: that the poet should not deal with human,
that is, moral, experience; that the subject-matter of poetry is of
an order essentially supra-human; that the poet has no way
of understanding his subject-matter. There will appear certain
qualifications to this summary, but they are of very little im-
portance.

In the same essay Poe states: "I hold that a long poem does not
exist. I maintain that the phrase, 'a long poem/ is a flat contra-
diction of terms." 7 And again, thus connecting the last state-
ment with the statement regarding Tennyson: "A poem deserves
its title only inasmuch as it elevates by exciting the soul. . . .
But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient."
"After the lapse of half an hour at the utmost, it [the excitementl
flags— fails— a revulsion ensues— and then the poem is in effect,
and in fact, no longer such." 8 "This great work [Paradise Lost],
in fact, is to be regarded as poetical, only when, losing sight of
that vital requisite of all works of Art, Unity, we view it merely
as a series of minor poems. If, to preserve its Unity,— its totality
of effect or impression— we read it (as would be necessary) at
a single sitting, the result is but a constant alternation of excite-
ment and depression. ... It follows from all this that the ulti-
mate, aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic under
the sun is a nullity:— and this is precisely the fact." 9

From these passages it follows: first, that Poe's very concep-
tion of poetic unity is one of mood, or emotion; and second, that

* Stedman and Woodberry, op. cit., I, 27.

7 Ibid., I, 3

8 Ibid., I,
•Ibid., 1,4.

he regards the existence of mood to be governed by narrow me-
chanical rules— in other words, exaltation of spirit is merely a
form of nervous excitement. The word effect is used here as else-
where as a synonym for impression; artistic unity is described
specifically as totality of effect. There appears to be no awareness
whatever of that comprehensive act of the spirit, in part intel-
lectual, whereby we understand and remember Paradise Lost
as a whole, seize the whole intention with intellect and with
memory, and, plunging into any passage, experience that passage
in relationship to the whole, an act in which the emotional ele-
ment, since it is involved in and supported by the rational under-
standing, rises superior to mechanical necessity.

We should observe further that in these passages Poe begins
that process of systematic exclusion, in the course of which he
eliminates from the field of English poetry nearly all of the
greatest acknowledged masters, reserving the field very largely
to Coleridge, Tennyson, Thomas Moore, himself, and R. H.
Home. As we shall see, this process of elimination is not a mere
accident of temperament, is not merely a series of accidents of
judgment, but is the necessary corollary, in the field of particular
judgments, of the general theory which we are now considering.

Poe continues: "On the other hand, it is clear that a poem may
be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epi-
grammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing
a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring ef-
fect." 10 He cites The Indian Serenade, by Shelley, a poem of
twenty-four lines, as unduly brief. He regarded one hundred
lines as approximately the most effective number for a poem;
the length of the lines themselves, he appears never to have con-
sidered, though if we compare two of his own poems of nearly
the same number of lines, Ulalume and The Raven, the former,
in fact and in effect, is much the shorter.

We may observe in the preceding quotation once more the
obliviousness to the function of intellectual content in poetry,
and an act of exclusion which deals very shortly, not only with
the epigrammatists, but also with every sonneteer in the lan-

10 Ibid., I, 6.
238

guage, including Shakespeare and Milton, and with all the mas-
ters of the short lyric, including so wide a diversity of poets as
Herbert, Herrick, Donne, and Landor.

By a further act of exclusion, he eliminates the great satirical
and didactic masters. In his essay on Bryant, he says: "A satire
is, of course, no poem." n And in The Poetic Principle: "We find
it [the 'epic mania'] succeeded by a heresy too palpably false
to be long tolerated. ... I allude to the heresy of The Didactic.
It has long been assumed that the end of all poetry is Truth.
Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this
moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We
Americans, especially, have patronized this happy idea; and we
Bostonians, very especially, have developed it in full. We have
taken it into our heads to write a poem simply for the poem's
sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design would
be to confess ourselves radically wanting in true poetic dignity
and force; but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit our-
selves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there
discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any
work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than
this very poem— this poem per se— this poem which is a poem
and nothing more— this poem written solely for the poem's
sake." 12

Now if Poe had merely intended to exclude some of the un-
satisfactory didactic poetry, let us say, of Longfellow or of Low-
ell, we should have very little complaint to make; however, these
poets are bad not because they are didactic, but because they
write badly, and because their didacticism is frequently unsound
in conception, and because the lesson which they endeavor to
teach is frequently connected only arbitrarily with their subjects.
The didactic close of Byrant's great lyric, To a Waterfowl, on
the other hand, is merely an explicit statement, and a fine state-
ment, of the idea governing the poem, an idea inherent, but in-
sufficiently obvious, in what has gone before, and it is foolish
to object to it; and in the poetry of Samuel Johnson, of Dryden,

u Ibid., I, 111.
12 Ibid., I, 8.

and of Pope, as in Milton's sonnets, we have yet another form of
didacticism, the loss of which would leave us vastly impover-
ished.13

Poe appears never to have grasped the simple and traditional
distinction between matter (truth) and manner (beauty); he
does not see that beauty is a quality of style instead of its subject-
matter, that it is merely the most complete communication po§^,
sible, through connotation as well as denotation, of the poet's
personal realization of a moral (or human) truth, whether that
truth be of very great importance or very little, a truth that
must be understood primarily in conceptual terms, regardless of
whether the poem ultimately embodies it in the form of descrip-
tion, of narration, or of exposition. A sound attitude toward a
major problem, communicated with adequacy of detail, is what
we ordinarily mean by sublimity. It is through the neglect of
these fundamental ideas that Poe runs into difficulty.

'With as deep a reverence for the True as ever inspired the
bosom of man/' he continues, "I would, nevertheless, limit its
modes of inculcation. I would limit to enforce them. I would
not enfeeble them by dissipation. The demands of Truth are se-
vere; she has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so
indispensable in Song, is precisely all that with which she has
nothing whatever to do. ... In enforcing a truth ... we must
be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse
of the poetical." 14

Poe appears oblivious to the possibility that we may come to a
truth with an attitude other than that of the advocate; that we
may, in brief, contemplate, with Dante, rather than enforce, with
Aquinas. It follows that he would not recognize the more com-
plex procedure of contemplating the enforcement of truth, the
procedure which results, for example, in the didacticism of Pope
and of Dryden; nor yet the contemplation of the need of the

13 It is instructive to compare To a Waterfowl with The Chambered Nautilus.
Both follow the same rhetorical formula, but in Bryant's poem the "moral" is
implicit throughout; in the poem by Holmes, it is a rhetorical imposition. The
poem by Holmes is impressively written, notwithstanding; but it illustrates the
more vulgar procedure.

14 Stedman and Woodberry, op. cit., I, 9.

240

enforcement of truth, the procedure which results in the satirical
poetry of the same writers; nor the contemplation of a discrep-
ancy between personal experience and a standard truth, a pro-
cedure which results in much of the poetry of Donne. Yet these
are all major human experiences; they all require individual per-
ception and moral adjustment; according to the traditional view,
they are thus legitimate material for poetry.

Poe sees truly enough that the enforcement of truth, in itself,
does not constitute poetry, and on the basis of that elementary
observation he falls into the common romantic error, which may
be stated briefly as follows: truth is not poetry; truth should
therefore be eliminated from poetry, in the interests of a purer
poetry. He would, in short, advise us to retain the attitude, but
to discard the object of the attitude. The correct formula, on the
other hand, is this: truth is not poetry; poetry is truth and some-
thing more. It is the completeness of the poetic experience which
makes it valuable. How thoroughly Poe would rob us of all sub-
ject matter, how thoroughly he would reduce poetry, from its
traditional position, at least when ideally considered, as the act
of complete comprehension, to a position of triviality and of
charlatanism, we shall presently see.

Poe's passion for exclusion, and the certitude that he has no
conception of moral sublimity in poetry, appear very clearly in
the essay on Home's Orion: 'We shall now be fully understood.
If, with Coleridge, who, however erring at times, was precisely
the mind fitted to decide such a question as this— if, with him,
we reject passion from the true, from the pure poetry— if we re-
ject even passion—if we discard as feeble, as unworthy of the
high spirituality of the theme (which has its origin in the God-
head)—if we dismiss even the nearly divine emotion of human
love, that emotion which merely to name causes the pen to
tremble,— with how much greater reason shall we dismiss all
else?" 16

The dismissal appears to be inclusive enough, by this time, in
all conscience. There would appear to be some confusion in Poe's
mind between a passionate or violent style, which (in spite of the

"Ibid., I, 268.

241

magnificence of King Lear) he might reasonably regard as in-
ferior to a style more serene, regardless of subject, as if the poet
were to rise superior to his passions in his contemplation of them,
and passion as subject-matter. It is his fundamental confusion of
matter and manner, to which I have already alluded.

In the same essay, and on the same subject, he writes: "Al-
though we argue, for example, with Coleridge, that poetry and
passion are discordant, yet we are willing to permit Tennyson
to bring, to the intense passion which prompted his Locksley
Hall, the aid of that terseness and pungency which are derivable
from rhythm and from rhyme. The effect he produces, however,
is purely passionate, and not, unless in detached passages of this
magnificent philippic, a properly poetic effect. His Oenone, on
the other hand, exalts the soul not into passion, but into a con-
ception of pure beauty, which in its elevation, its calm and
intense rapture, has in it a foreshadowing of the future and spir-
itual life, and as far transcends earthly passion as the holy radi-
ance of the sun does the glimmering and feeble phosphorescence
of the glow-wbrm. His Morte-d' Arthur is in the same majestic
vein. The Sensitive Plant of Shelley is in the same sublime spirit
. . . Readers do exist . . . and always will exist, who, to hearts
of maddening fervor, unite in perfection, the sentiment of the
beautiful— that divine sixth sense which is yet so faintly under-
stood, that sense which phrenology has attempted to embody in
its organ of ideality,™ that sense which speaks of God through
His purest, if not His sole attribute, which proves, and which
alone proves his existence ... the origin of poetry lies in a
thirst for a wilder beauty than earth supplies. . . . Poetry itself
is the imperfect effort to quench this immortal thirst by novel
combinations of beautiful forms. . . ." 17

In the remarks on Oenone, we may seem at first glance to have
the hint that Poe has approached the concept of moral sublimity,
but the last sentence quoted brings us back abruptly to the triv-
ial; the exaltation is not a moral exaltation, not the result of

16 See Edward Hungerford, Poe and Phrenology, American Literature, II,
209-31 (Nov., 1930).

17 Stedman and Woodberry, op. cit., I, 267-8.

242

the exercise of the intelligence and of character, but is the result
of manipulation and of trickery. And were we to allow ourselves
the luxury of worrying about Poe's minor obscurities, his use of
the word beautiful in the last sentence would complicate our
problem inextricably: that is, it appears that we achieve the beau-
tiful by new combinations of items which are already beautiful;
we have again his helpless inability to separate matter from man-
ner, the poem from its subject.

It is obvious, then, that poetry is not, for Poe, a refined and
enriched technique of moral comprehension. It can be of no
aid to us in understanding ourselves or in ordering our lives, for
most of our experience is irrelevant to it. If, indeed, certain hu-
man experiences are admitted as legitimate subjects, they are ad-
mitted, as we shall see, because the poet cannot write without
writing about something— even the most irresponsible use of lan-
guage involves an inescapable minimum of statement, however
incomplete or dismembered; and those experiences are admitted
which seem to involve the minimum of complexity. They are
admitted, moreover, not as something valuable in themselves,
not as something to be understood, but as ingredients in a for-
mula by means of which something outside our experience may
be suggested. If Poe moves us most to indignation when defining
his exclusions, he perplexes us most profoundly when he en-
deavors to approximate a definition of what he would include.

He writes in The Poetic Principle: "An immortal instinct,
deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the
Beautiful. . . . This thirst belongs to the immortality of man. It
is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial exist-
ence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere ap-
preciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the
Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic Prescience of the glories
beyond the grave, we struggle by multiform combinations among
the things and thoughts of Time to attain a portion of that
Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity
alone. And thus when by Poetry— or when by Music, the most
entrancing of the Poetic moods— we find ourselves melted into
tears, we weep then, not as the Abbate Gravia supposes through

243

excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sor-
row at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once
and forever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through
the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and inde-
terminate glimpses." 18

Briefly, Poe implies something like this: the proper subject-
matter of poetry is Beauty, but since true Beauty exists only in
eternity, the poet cannot experience it and is deprived of his
subject-matter; by manipulating the materials of our present life,
we may suggest that Beauty exists elsewhere, and this is the best
that we can do.

This is not the same thing as the mysticism of such a writer
as Very, for Very sought to define what he considered a truth,
the experience of mystical beatitude, and the experience of hu-
man longing for it; the former experience, though inexpressible,
he strove to express clearly; the latter experience, since it was
clearly expressible, he expressed clearly. Very, moreover, as a
Christian, believed in moral judgment, in poetry and out, in spite
of the fact thut as a Calvinist he seems to have believed that his
moral judgments were actually dictated by God. Nor is it the
same thing as the awareness on the part of Emily Dickinson of
the abyss between the human and the supra-human or the extra-
human, for she merely defines the tragic experience of confront-
ing the abyss and communicates her own moral adjustment to
the experience, or at least she does no more than this in her better
poems. Both poets seek to understand and both are as far as may
be successful; Poe seeks a justification for refusing to understand.
Poe is no more a mystic than a moralist; he is an excited senti-
mentalist.

As we may discover from other passages, especially in The
Philosophy of Composition, Poe had certain definite ideas in re-
gard to which forms of human experience lent themselves best
to this procedure, and also in regard' to the rules of the pro-
cedure. Having decided, in an astonishing passage to which I
shall presently return, that a melancholy tone most greatly facili-
tated his purpose, he wrote: "'Of all melancholy topics, what,

"Ibid., 10-11.
244

according to the universal understanding of mankind is the
most melancholy?' Death— was the obvious reply. 'And when/
I said, 'is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?' From
what I have already explained at some length, the answer here
also is obvious— When it most closely allies itself to Beauty; the
death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most
poetical topic in the world. . . .' " 19 In other words, we are not
concerned to understand human experience; we are seeking,
rather, the isolated elements, or fragments, of experience which
may best serve as the ingredients of a formula for the production
of a kind of emotional delusion, and our final decision in the
matter is determined again by our inability to distinguish be-
tween the subject and the style of poetry, by the conviction that
beauty is the subject of poetry.

The reader should note carefully what this means; perhaps he
will pardon me for restating it: the subject-matter of poetry,
properly considered, is by definition incomprehensible and un-
attainable; the poet, in dealing with something else, toward
which he has no intellectual or moral responsibilities whatever
("Unless incidentally/' says Poe, "poetry has no concern what-
ever either with Duty or with Truth" 20), should merely en-
deavor to suggest that a higher meaning exists— in other words,
should endeavor to suggest the presence of a meaning when he
is aware of none. The poet has only to write a good description
of something physically impressive, with an air of mystery, an
air of meaning concealed.

An air of mystery, of strangeness, will then be of necessity, not
an adjunct of poetic style, but the very essence of poetic style. In
Ligeia there occurs the well-known passage which it is now
necessary to quote: " 'There is no exquisite beauty/ says Bacon,
Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of
beauty, 'without some strangeness in the proportion.' " But in
Poe's terms, strangeness and beauty, from the standpoint of the
practical poet, are identical. Related to this concept is his concept
of originality, which I shall take up later and separately.

18 Ibid., I, 39.
80 Ibid., I, 12.

245

Poe is, in brief, an explicit obscurantist. Hawthorne, in his
four last and unfinished romances, gives us the physical embodi-
ment of allegory without the meaning to be embodied, but he
appears to hope for a meaning, to be, somehow, pathetically and
unsuccessfully in search of one. Henry James, in many stories,
as in The Spoils of Poynton, to choose an obvious example, gives
us a sequence of facts without being able to pass judgment upon
them, so that the stories remain almost as inconclusive as Stock-
ton's trivial tour de force, The Lady or the Tiger? Both men
frequently write in advance of their understanding, the one as an
allegorist, the other as a novelist. But in Poe, obscurantism has
ceased to be merely an accident of inadequate understanding;
it has become the explicit aim of writing and has begun the gen-
eration of a method. Poe's aesthetic is an aesthetic of obscurant-
ism. We have that willful dislocation of feeling from understand-
ing, which, growing out of the uncertainty regarding the nature
of moral truth in general and its identity in particular situations
which produced such writers as Hawthorne and James, was
later to result through the exploitation of special techniques in
the violent aberrations of the Experimental School of the twen-
tieth century, culminating in the catastrophe of Hart Crane.21

Poe speaks a great deal of the need of originality. This quality,
as he understands it, appears to be a fairly simple mechanical
device, first, for fixing the attention, and second, for heightening
the effect of strangeness. We may obtain a fair idea of his con-
cept of originality of theme from his comment on a poem by
Amelia Welby, quoted in the series of brief notes entitled Minor
Contemporaries: "The subject has nothing of originality:— A wid-
ower muses by the grave of his wife. Here then is a great de-
merit; for originality of theme, if not absolutely first sought,
should be among the first. Nothing is more clear than this prop-
osition, although denied by the chlorine critics (the grass-green).
The desire of the new is an element of the soul. The most
exquisite pleasures grow dull in repetition. A strain of music
enchants. Heard a second time, it pleases. Heard a tenth, it does

21 For a detailed study of these techniques, see pages 30 to 101 of this vol-
ume.

246

not displease. We hear it a twentieth, and ask ourselves why we
admired. At the fiftieth it produces ennui, at the hundredth dis-
gust." »

Now I do not know what music most delighted Poe, unless
perchance it may have been the melodies of Thomas Moore, but
if I may be permitted to use exact numbers in the same figura-
tive sense in which I conceive that Poe here used them, I am
bound to say that my own experience with music differs pro-
foundly. The trouble again is traceable to Poe's failure to under-
stand the moral basis of art, to his view of art as a kind of
stimulant, ingeniously concocted, which may, if one is lucky,
raise one to a moment of divine delusion. A Bach fugue or a
Byrd mass moves us not primarily because of any originality it
may display, but because of its sublimity as I have already de-
fined the term. Rehearing can do no more than give us a fuller
and more secure awareness of this quality. The same is true of
Paradise Lost. Poe fails to see that the originality of a poem lies
not in the newness of the general theme— for if it did, the possi-
bilities of poetry would have been exhausted long before the
time of Poe— but in the quality of the personal intelligence, as
that intelligence appears in the minutiae of style, in the defining
limits of thought and of feeling, brought to the subject by the
poet who writes of it. The originality, from Poe's point of view,
of the subjects of such poems as The Raven, The Sleeper, and
Ulalume would reside in the fantastic dramatic and scenic effects
by means of which the subject of simple regret is concealed,
diffused, and rendered ludicrous. From the same point of view,
Rose Aylmer would necessarily be lacking in originality.

In The Philosophy of Composition Poe gives us a hint as to his
conception of originality of style. After a brief discourse on origi-
nality of versification, and the unaccountable way in which it has
been neglected, he states that he lays no claim to originality as
regards the meter or the rhythm of The Raven, but only as re-
gards the stanza: "nothing even remotely approaching this com-
bination has ever been attempted." 23 Again we see Poe's tend-

22 Stedman and Woodberry, op. cit., Ill, 284.
38 Ibid., 1,42.

247

ency to rely upon the mechanically startling, in preference to the
inimitable. This fact, coupled with his extraordinary theories of
meter, which I shall examine separately, bears a close relation-
ship to the clumsiness and insensitivity of his verse. Read three
times, his rhythms disgust, because they are untrained and in-
sensitive and have no individual life within their surprising me-
chanical frames.

Before turning to the principal poems for a brief examination
of them, we should observe at least one remark on the subject of
melancholy. In The Philosophy of Composition, after stating
that, in planning The Raven, he had decided upon Beauty as the
province of the poem, Poe writes as follows: "Regarding, then,
Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone
of its highest manifestation— and all experience has shown that
this tone is one of sadness. Beauty, of whatever kind, in its
supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to
tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical

tones."24

Now if the reader will keep in mind the principles that we
have already deduced; namely, that Beauty is unattainable, that
the poet can merely suggest its existence, that this suggestion
depends upon the ingenious manipulation of the least obstructive
elements of normal experience— it will at once be obvious that
Poe is here suggesting a reversal of motivation. That is, since
Beauty excites to tears (let us assume with Poe, for the moment,
that it does), if we begin with tears, we may believe ourselves
moved for a moment by Beauty. This interpretation is supported
solidly by the last two sentences quoted, particularly when we
regard their order.

The Philosophy of Composition thus appears after all to be a
singularly shocking document. Were it an examination of the
means by which a poet might communicate a comprehensible
judgment, were it a plea that sucK communication be carefully
planned in advance, we could do no less than approve. But it
is not that; it is rather an effort to establish the rules for a species
of incantation, of witchcraft; rules, whereby, through the ma-

* Ibid., I, 36.
248

nipulation of certain substances in certain arbitrary ways, it may
be possible to invoke, more or less accidentally, something that
appears more or less to be a divine emanation. It is not surprising
that Poe expressed more than once a very qualified appreciation
of Milton.

We may fairly conclude this phase of the discussion by a
passage from The Poetic Principle, a passage quoted also by Miss
Alterton : "It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now
and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a
shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes
which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels.0 25 It should
now be clear what Poe had in mind when he referred to Tenny-
son as the most elevating and the most pure of the poets; what
Tennyson might have thought of the attribution is beside the
point.

HI

Before turning to the poems themselves, we should examine
very briefly Poe's general theory of meter, as it appears primarily
in The Rationale of Verse. And before doing this we should
recall to mind in very general terms the common methods of
scansion. They are: first, the classical, in which the measure is
based upon quantity, or length of syllable, and in which accent is
a source merely of variation and of complication; second, the
French, or syllabic, in which the measure is a matter wholly of
the number of syllables in the line, and in which the primary
source of variation is quantity, if the language be one, like
French, which lacks mechanical stress; third, the Anglo-Saxon,
or accentual, in which the measure is based purely upon the
number of accents, variation being derived from every other
source possible; and fourth, the English, or accentual-syllabic,
which resembles the classical system in its types of feet, but in
which the foot and measure are determined by accent instead of
by quantity.

Since it is with English verse, primarily, that we are dealing,

"Ibid., I, 12.

249

we should note one or two other points in connection with it.
First, the language is not divided into accented and unaccented
syllables; within certain limits, there is an almost infinite varia-
tion of accent, and no two syllables are ever accented in exactly
the same way. Consequently, for metrical purposes, a syllable is
considered accented or unaccented only in relationship to the
other syllables in the same foot. For example, let us take Ben
Jonson's line:

Drink to/ me on/ly with/ thine eyes.

The accentuation of the first foot is inverted; in each of the
other feet the accent falls on the second syllable. Yet the word
with, which even in normal prose receives more accent than the
last syllable of only, is less heavily accented than the word thine;
so that in the last two feet we have a mounting series of four
degrees of accent. This variety of accent is one form of variation
in English meter; another is quantity; another is the normal pro-
cedure of substitution.

We may observe the obvious opposition of quantity to accent
in the first foot, a normal iambic one, of this line from Robert
Bridges:

Nay, barren are the mountains, and spent the streams.

The first syllable of the foot, Nay, is long and unaccented; the
second and final syllable, bar-, is short and accented. On the other
hand, length and accent may be brought to coincide; or there may
be immeasurably subtle variations between the two extremes.
These sources of variation, when understood and mastered, pro-
vide the fluid sensitivity to be found in the best English verse,
within even the most rigid of patterns.

But to all this Poe appears oblivious. He says: "Accented syl-
lables are of course always long/' 20 This initial confusion is
obviously related to Poe's preference for meters dependent upon
a heavy, unvaried, and mechanical beat. He makes little use of

*' Ibid., I, 60.
250

quantity except as a reinforcement of accent; where it does not
reinforce the accent, the failure is an accident and usually results
in a clumsy variant rather than a pleasing one.

In The Rationale of Verse, Poe offers a new system for mark-
ing scansion, based in part upon the heresy which I have just
mentioned, in part upon the equally gross concept that all syl-
lables can be grouped into general classes, each class having a
fixed and recognizable degree of accent. He is even so rash as to
attempt the scansion of Horace on this basis, and to state that
French verse is without music because the language is without
accent. Poe had an ear for only the crudest of distinctions.

IV

The poems on which Poe's reputation as an important poet
must rest are the following: The City in the Sea, The Haunted
Palace, The Conqueror Worm, Ulalume, The Raven, and The
Sleeper. These are the ambitious efforts; the others, even if one
grant them a high measure of success, are minor. The City in the
Sea is generally, and I believe rightly, regarded as Poe's best per-
formance. After the first five lines, which are bad enough to have
been written by Kipling, the poem displays few gross lapses and
some excellent passages. There is admirable description, and
there is throughout an intense feeling of meaning withheld. We
have, in brief, all of the paraphernalia of allegory except the
significance. The poem falls short of being one of the romantic
masterpieces of obscure emotionalism chiefly because of weak
phrases: it remains Poe's most startling and talented failure.

In The Haunted Palace, the physical material has allegorical
significance which is perfectly definite. The palace of the mon-
arch Thought is the head; the windows are the eyes; the door is
the mouth; the spirits are the thoughts, which issue as words.
This, however, is not the real explanation of the poem, for the
subject is the change from sanity to insanity. The change occurs
in the fifth stanza, suddenly, and without motivation: we have
feeling divorced completely from understanding; the change it-
self is mad, for it is inexplicable.

251

Ulalume contains very much the same problems as the other
poems not yet considered. In examining this poem, we must con-
fine ourselves strictly to what Poe offered us, namely, the poem,
and refrain from biographical entanglements, which are both
gratuitous and uncertain. If the poem is not self-sufficient, it is
obscure; and, as critics of art, we are bound to rest with the as-
sumption that the obscurity was satisfactory to Poe.

The poem opens with allusions to unidentified places, places
with dark but unexplained histories: Weir, Auber, ghoul-haunted
woodlands; we have, in other words, a good deal of ready-made
Gothic mystery. The items are introduced to evoke emotion at
small cost: they are familiar romantic devices, but they are none
the less deliberately obscure. In the passage opening with the
alley Titanic, and ending with Mount Yaanek and the Boreal
Pole, we have an explicit reference to a period of violent feeling
in the history of the protagonist: the cause and nature of the
feeling are alike unexplained at the time, and even the loss of
Ulalume, which is a very general sort of datum, is an inadequate
account of feelings so grotesquely violent. In lines twenty to
twenty-nine, there are dark references to a past event, references
which are ultimately cleared up when we learn of the burial of
Ulalume, but which, as we come to them, have the effect of
gratuitous emotionalizing. Lines thirty to forty are the best in the
poem: they hint of the strangeness of the nocturnal turning to-
ward dawn, and then describe the appearance of Astarte, as the
rising moon; if this strangeness has any spiritual significance,
however, we are given no clue to it. The protagonist wishes to
accept Astarte as a guide; Psyche distrusts her; they argue at
length but darkly— darkly, in that the purpose of the protagonist
and the fears of Psyche alike are not given us, so that the argu-
ment is like one in a dream. Psyche yields, but as she does so,
they are led by Astarte to the door of the tomb, which brings the
protagonist up shortly, with a cold realization of his loss. Lines
ninety-five to one hundred and four, omitted by Griswold and
by most of the cheap popular editions, but important, it would
seem, to the poem, state the possibility that Astarte may have
been conjured up to prevent their further irresponsible wander-
252

ing in the haunted woodlands (which I take to represent the
loose feelings through which they have been moving) by recall-
ing them to a sense of definite tragedy.

In other words, the subject of grief is employed as a very gen-
eral excuse for a good deal of obscure and only vaguely related
emotion. This subject is used exactly as we should expect to find
it used after examining Poe's aesthetic theory. The poem is as
surely an excursion into the incoherencies of dream-conscious-
ness as is the Larme of Rimbaud; yet it lacks wholly the fine
surface of that poem.

In The Raven, that attenuated exercise for elocutionists, and
in The Sleeper, the general procedure is identical, but the meter
in the former and the writing in both are so thoroughly bad that
other considerations appear unnecessary. The Sleeper is a kind
of Gothic parody of Henry King's imperfect but none the less
great Exequy: a comparison of the two poems will show the
difference between moral grandeur and the sensationalism of a
poet devoid of moral intelligence. It is noteworthy that King is
commonly and justly regarded as one of the smaller poets of his
period.

In The Conqueror Worm, the desire for inexpensive feeling
has led to a piece of writing that is, phrase by phrase, solidly
bromidic.

v

In his criticism of Hawthorne's Tales, Poe outlines his theory
of the short story. He defends the tale, as preferable to the novel,
on the same grounds as those on which he defends the short
poem in preference to the long. He states the necessity of careful
planning and of economy of means.

He says: ". . . having conceived with deliberate care, a cer-
tain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he [the skillful
literary artist] then invents such incidents— he then combines
such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived
effect." 27 Now the word effect, here as elsewhere in Poe, means

27 Ibid., II, 31.

253

impression, or mood; it is a word that connotes emotion purely
and simply. So that we see the story-teller, like the poet, inter-
ested primarily in the creation of an emotion for its own sake,
not in the understanding of an experience. It is significant in this
connection that most of his heroes are mad or on the verge of
madness; a datum which settles his action firmly in the realm of
inexplicable feeling from the outset.

Morella begins thus: "With a feeling of deep yet most singular
affection I regarded my friend Morella. Thrown by accident into
her society many years ago, my soul, from our first meeting,
burned with fires it had never before known; but the fires were
not of Eros, and bitter and tormenting to my spirit was the
gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their un-
usual meaning or regulate their vague intensity/* And Ligeia:
"I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely
where, I first became acquainted with the Lady Ligeia. Long
years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much
suffering." The Assignation: "Ill-fated and mysterious man!— be-
wildered in the brilliancy of thine own imagination, and fallen
in the flames of thine own youth/' The Tell-Tale Heart: "True!
—nervous— very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am! but
why will you say that I am* mad?" Berenice: ". . . it is wonder-
ful what a stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life-
wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of
my commonest thought/' Eleanora: "I am come of a race noted
for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me
mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or
is not the loftiest intelligence— whether much that is glorious—
whether all that is profound— does not spring from disease of
thought— from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the
general intellect." Roderick Usher, in addition, is mad; The
Black Cat is a study in madness; The Masque of the Red Death
is a study in hallucinatory terror. They are all studies in hysteria;
they are written for the sake of the hysteria.

In discussing Hawthorne, . however, Poe suggests other possi-
bilities: "We have said that the tale has a point of superiority

even over the poem. In fact, while the rhythm of this latter is an
essential aid in the development of the poem's highest idea— the
idea of the Beautiful— the artificialities of this rhythm are an
inseparable bar to the development of all points of thought or
expression which have their basis in Truth. But Truth is often,
and in very great degree, the aim of the tale. Some of the finest
tales are tales of ratiocination. Thus the field of this species of
composition, if not in so elevated a region on the mountain of
the Mind, is a tableland of far vaster extent than the domain of
the mere poem. Its products are never so rich, but infinitely more
numerous, and infinitely more appreciable by the mass of man-
kind. The writer of the prose tale, in short, may bring to his
theme a vast variety of modes of inflection of thought and ex-
pression (the ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic, or the
humorous) which are not only antagonistic to the nature of the
poem, but absolutely forbidden by one of its most peculiar and
indispensable adjuncts; we allude, of course, to rhythm. It may
be added here, par parenth£se, that the author who aims at the
purely beautiful in a prose tale is laboring at a great disadvantage.
For Beauty can be better treated in the poem. Not so with terror,
or passion, or horror, or a multitude of other such points." 28

Poe speaks in this passage, not only of the tale of effect, to
which allusion has already been made, but of the tale of ratio-
cination, that is, of the detective story, such as The Gold Bug or
The Murders in the Rue Morgue. It is noteworthy that this is the
only example which he gives of the invasion of the field of fiction
by Truth; in other words, his primary conception of intellectual
activity in fiction appears to be in the contrivance of a puzzle.
Between this childish view of intellectuality, on the one hand,
and the unoriented emotionalism of the tale of effect on the
other, we have that vast and solid region inhabited by the major
literary figures of the world, the region in which human experi-
ence is understood in moral terms and emotion is the result of
that understanding, or is seen in relationship to that understand-
ing and so judged. This region appears to have been closed to

* Ibid., II, 31.

Poe; if we except the highly schematized and crudely melodra-
matic allegory of William Wilson, we have no basis for believing
that he ever discovered it.

VI

If Poe's chief work is confined to the communication of feel-
ing, what can we say of the quality of that communication? Poe
rests his case for art on taste, and though we may disagree with
him, yet we are bound to examine his own taste, for if he has no
taste, he has nothing. It is my belief that he has little or none.

Every literary critic has a right to a good many errors of judg-
ment; or at least every critic makes a good many. But if we
survey Poe's critical opinions we can scarcely fail to be astonished
by them. He understood little or nothing that was written before
his own age, and though he was not unaware of the virtues,
apparently, of some of the better stylists of his period, as for ex-
ample Coleridge, he at one time or another praised such writers
as R. H. H&rne, N. P. Willis, Thomas Hood, and Thomas
Moore as highly or more highly; in fact, he placed Home and
Moore among the greatest geniuses of all time. He praised Bryant
above his American contemporaries, but he based his praise upon
poems which did not deserve it. He was able to discover nu-
merous grammatical errors in one of the lesser novels of Cooper,
but he was unable to avoid making such errors in large numbers
in his own prose; and the faultless, limpid, and unforgettable
prose of the seventh chapter of The Deerslayer, the profundity
of conception of The Bravo, the characterization of Satanstoe
and The Chainbearer, were as far beyond his powers of com-
prehension as beyond his powers of creation.

If we neglect for a moment the underlying defect in all of
Poe's work, the absence of theme, and scrutinize carefully the
manner in which he communicates feeling, in which alone he is
interested, we can scarcely avoid the observation that his work is
compounded almost wholly of stereotyped expressions, most of
them of a very melodramatic cast. Now one cannot object to a
man wholly on the basis of stereotyped expression. There is a

256

measure of stereotyped expression, apparently inadvertent, in
many poems and works of prose which sustain themselves not-
withstanding by virtue of a fundamental vigor of conception:
W. H. Hudson is a writer of prose who sins extensively in this
respect, but survives; Henry King is such a poet. On the other
hand, the most finished masters of style, and this is perhaps
especially true of the poets, have all, in some measure, employed
the formulary phrase deliberately to achieve various but precise
results: Crashaw, Milton, and Blake are familiar examples of the
procedure. Indeed, if we imagine a very precise and solid sub-
structure of theme, as in Crashaw's paraphrase of the Twenty-
third Psalm, it is possible to see how a passage deliberately
stereotyped in a certain measure, yet with a slight but precise ad-
mixture of personal perception, may at once define a traditional
concept and the relationship of that concept to a personal per-
ception, in fact the entire relationship of personal to traditional
feeling— and the perception of such a relationship is in itself and
as a whole a profoundly personal or original perception— in a
manner more successful than any other conceivable; this pro-
cedure, however, presupposes a theme, a sense of history, or
tradition, and a recognition of the poetic art as a technique of
judgment, and it necessitates incidentally a masterly understand-
ing and control of meter. Poe, on the other hand endeavors as far
as may be to escape from a paraphrasable theme; he recognizes
no obligation to understand the minimum of theme from which
he cannot escape— in fact, he seems to recognize an obligation
not to understand it; his historical training and understanding
amounted nearly to nothing; so that there is nothing in his work
either to justify his formulary expression and to give it content
and precision of meaning, on the one hand, or, on the other, to
give his work as a whole sufficient force and substance to make
us forget the formulary expression— we merely have melodra-
matic stereotypes in a vacuum. The last instrument which, if
well employed, might to some extent have alleviated his phras-
ing, and which did, in fact, alleviate it in part in a few fragments
to which I shall presently allude, the instrument of meter, he
was unable to control except occasionally and accidentally. His

theory of meter was false. Whether the theory arose from imper-
ception or led to imperception is immaterial, but the fact remains
that his meter is almost invariably clumsy and mechanical in a
measure perhaps never equalled by another poet who has en-
joyed a comparable reputation. His favorite stanzaic and struc-
tural device, the device of mechanical repetition, is perhaps
equally the result of his untrained and insensitive taste and of
his feeling no responsibility to say anything accurately— when
there is nothing in particular to be said, every technique is a
technique of diffusion, for a technique of concise definition
would reduce the poem to nothing.

To illustrate the weakness of detail in his poems and stories is
an easy matter; to illustrate the extent of that weakness is im-
possible, for his work is composed of it. In his poems, one may
enumerate the following passages as fairly well executed, if one
grants him temporarily his fundamental assumptions about art:
Ulalume, lines thirty to thirty-eight, provided one can endure
the meter; The City in the Sea, lines six to eleven, lines twenty-
four to the end; To One in Paradise, the first stanza and perhaps
the last; the early poem To Helen, especially the first three or
four lines; The Spirits of the Dead, lines five to ten. Perhaps the
only passage of his prose which displays comparable ability is
the opening of The Assignation: the conception is merely that of
the typically Byronic man of mystery, and the detail, in its rough
identity, is comparably typical, but there is a certain life in the
language, especially in the rhythm of the language, that renders
the passage memorable.

For the rest, we encounter prose such as the following: "As if
in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found
the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the
speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their pon-
derous and ebony jaws." "It was a voluptuous scene, that mas-
querade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held.
They were seven— an imperial suite." "Where were the souls of
the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold,
they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment so bedecked,
a maiden and a daughter so beloved?" "Morella's erudition was

258

profound. As I hope to live, her talents were of no common order
—her powers of mind were gigantic/'

We are met on every page of his poetry with resounding pu-
erilities such as "the pallid bust of Pallas/' and "the viol, the
violet, and the vine." The poetry, in fact, is composed almost
wholly of such items as these:

Ah, broken is the golden bowl!— the spirit flown forever!
Let the hell toll! a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river:—
And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?— weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!

At midnight in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.

For alas! alas! with me

The light of Life is o'er!
No more— no more— no more—

(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)

Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,
Or the stricken eagle soar!

That motley drama— oh, be sure

It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased forevermore,

By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in

To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,

And horror the soul of the plot.

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me— filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.

This is an art to delight the soul of a servant girl; it is a matter
for astonishment that mature men can be found to take this kind

259

of thing seriously. It is small wonder that the claims of Chivers
have been seriously advanced of late years in the face of such an
achievement; they have been fairly advanced, for Chivers is
nearly as admirable a poet. If one is in need of a standard, one
should have recourse to Bridges' Eras, to Hardy's During Wind
and Rain, or to Arnold's Dover Beach. And in making one's
final estimate of the quality of Poe's taste, one should not fail to
consider the style of his critical prose, of which the excerpts
quoted in the present essay are fair, and indeed, as specimens oF
taste, are random examples.

VII

On what grounds, if any, can we then defend Poe? We can
obviously defend his taste as long as we honestly like it. The
present writer is willing to leave it, after these few remarks, to its
admirers. As to his critical theory, however, and the structural
defects of hi^ work, it appears to me certain that the difficulty
which I have raised is the central problem in Poe criticism; yet
not only has it never been met, but, so far as one can judge, it
has scarcely been recognized.

The attempt to justify Poe on the basis of his place in history
can arise only from a confusion of processes: to explain a man's
place in history is not the same thing as to judge his value. Poe
was largely formed by the same influences which formed other
men, both better and worse, Coleridge as well as Chivers; his
particular nature resulted in his pushing certain essential ro-
mantic notions very nearly as far as they could go. It is unlikely,
on the other hand, that the course of romantic literature would
have been very different except (perhaps) in America, had Poe
never been born; in any event, his influence could only have
been a bad one, and to assert that he exerted an influence is not
to praise him. His clinical value resides in the fact that as a speci-
men of late romantic theory and practice he is at once extreme
and typical. To understand the nature of his confusion is to come
nearer to an understanding not only of his American contempo-
260

raries, but of French Symbolism and of American Experimental-
ism as well.

There are, I believe, two general lines of argument or proce-
dure that may be used more or less in support of Poe's position;
one is that of the Alterton-Craig Introduction, the other (if I
may cite another eminent example) is that of Professor Floyd
Stovall.

The argument of the Introduction appears to be roughly that
Poe is an intellectual poet, because: first, he worked out in
Eureka a theory of cosmic harmony and unity; second, related to
this, he held a theory of the harmony and unity of the parts of
the poem; and third, he devoted a certain amount of rational
effort to working out the rules by which this harmony and unity
could be attained.

But this intellectuality, if that is the name for it, is all anterior
to the poem, not in the poem; it resides merely in the rules for
the practice of the obscurantism which I have defined. The In-
troduction cites as evidence of Poe's recognition of the intel-
lectual element in poetry, his essay on Drake and Halleck, yet
the intellectuality in question here is plainly of the sort which I
have just described. As a result, Professor Craig's comparison of
Poe to Donne, Dryden, and Aquinas, is, to the present writer at
least, profoundly shocking.

The only alternative is that of Professor Stovall, as well as of
a good many others: to accept Poe's theory of Beauty as if it were
clearly understood and then to examine minor points of Poe
criticism with lucidity and with learning. But Poe's theory of
Beauty is not understood, and no casual allusion to Plato will
ever clarify it.

261

JONES VERY AND R. W. EMERSON

Aspects of New England Mysticism

But thou art far away among Time's toys. . . .

IN THE PAST TWO DECADES two major American writers have
been rediscovered and established securely in their rightful
places in literary history. I refer to Emily Dickinson and to
Herman Melville. I am proposing the establishment of a third,
who is no doubt the least of the three but who is nevertheless
a writer of impressive qualities.1

Jones Very was born at Salem, Massachusetts, on August 28th,
1813, and died there on May 8th, 1880. In 1839 a collection of
his essays and poems, selected at least in part by R. W. Emerson,
was published at Boston by Little and Brown, in the third year of
that firm's existence. In 1883 an incomplete but on the whole a
very judicious collection of his poems alone, with William P.
Andrews as editor and memorialist, was issued at Boston by
Houghton Mifflin. And in 1886 the same firm issued a "Com-
plete and Revised Edition" of Poems and Essays, by Jones Very,
with a brief but admirable biographical sketch by James Freeman
Clarke, and a wholly superfluous preface by C. A. Bartol. This
edition, in spite of its containing a few excellent poems lacking
in the previous edition, and in spite of its offering a few prefer-

should mention also Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, a selection of
whose poems was issued in 1931 by Knopf; the rediscover er, editor, and
memorialist being Mr. Witter Bynner. Tuckerman is unquestionably a dis-
tinguished poet: he is, however, romantic in the essential sense; he divorces
feeling from motive as far as possible. The beautifully executed sonnet be-
ginning "An upper chamber in a darkened house" is a perfect example of the
procedure: a man is imagined in a tragic, but impenetrable, setting, to serve
as the symbol of a feeling with which he has no connection and the source of
which we are not given. Tuckerman is much like the Hawthorne of the last
romances, except that he writes better. [After these remarks were written, Pro-
fessor Thomas H. Johnson, of Yale, announced a major and now famous dis-
covery: that of Edward Taylor.]

262

able, as well as a few less excellent, variants, may have been
responsible for the death of Very's nascent reputation, for it
carries an enormous amount of dead material. If there are fur-
ther editions, they have not fallen into my hands.2 The volume
of 1886 contains as a frontispiece a photograph of the author,
showing a long and narrow New England face, extremely sensi-
tive yet equally ascetic, immaculate alike in flesh and in spirit,
surely the face of a saint, and a face worthy of one of the finest
of poets.

Very was about ten years younger than Emerson and about
four years older than Thoreau. Me preached at times in the Uni-
tarian pulpit; he is commonly listed as one of the minor Tran-
scendentalists; yet both facts are misleading. He was a mystic,
primarily, whose theological and spiritual affiliations were with
the earlier Puritans and Quakers rather than with the Unitarians
or with the friends of Emerson; and if a minor writer, he was at
least not one in relationship to the Transcendentalists.

He was a Unitarian only by virtue of the historical connection
between the Unitarian and Puritan Churches and by virtue of
the wide hospitality of the Unitarians. He was not a Transcen-
dentalist at all, but a Christian, and a dogmatic one; his only
point of contact with Emerson was in regard to the surrender of
the will, that is, the submission of oneself to the direct guidance
of the Spirit. He differed from Emerson in that Emerson was a
pantheist and a moral relativist, so that Emerson's guiding Spirit
was, in effect, instinct and personal whim, which, in his terms,
became identical with the Divine Imperative, but which, in prac-
tice, amounted to a kind of benevolent if not invariably benefi-
cent sentimentalism. The religious experience for Emerson was a
kind of good-natured self-indulgence; for Very it was a sublime
exaltation, which appears to have endured until his death. Very
was beyond question a saintly man, and we hesitate to doubt a

2 When I first published this essay, in the American Review, for May, 1936,
I stated that I had not seen the edition of 1839. I was promptly, and, consider-
ing its rarity, munificently, presented with a copy by the Reverend Charles
Morris Addison, of Cambridge, Mass. A comparison of the three texts makes it
obvious that a critical edition of Very is much to be desired.

263

saint when he states that he is a mystic. Very's poems bear wit-
ness unanswerably that he had the experience which Emerson
merely recommends.

Very's spiritual life was passed on that minute island of being,
which is occupied in common by the more exalted of the Friends
and of the Puritans. Whereas the Friend taught the importance
of the submission to the Divine Will, the Puritan taught the
inevitability of the submission; the private will, either way, is
stricken from the conscious life of the intensely devout; and
when the Holy Spirit bears witness to the beatitude of the Pu-
ritan, as it bore witness in the heart of Jonathan Edwards, that
Puritan lives much as does an exalted member of the Society of
Friends. The reader might be led to believe that Very's connec-
tions with the Friends were more obvious than his connections
with the Puritans, for he recommended the submission of the
will in many poems, and in only one— Justification })y Faith,
which appears only in the edition of 1886— spoke of the inevi-
tability of the submission; but as a Unitarian, his background
was Puritan, Snd it is characteristic of the Puritan, as of every
other kind of determinist, to recommend on moral grounds that
which he professes to believe inevitable as a matter of cosmology,
to confess by implication to a belief in that power of choice which
he explicitly denies; indeed the familiar and daily literature of
the Puritans— the literature of sermons, memoirs, and similar
documents— displays repeatedly the same recommendation that
we find in Very, and the novels of O. W. Holmes, if we feel that
we need their testimony, bear witness to the recurrence of the
recommendation in Calvinistic conversation.

The perfect dogmatic definition of Very's position as a New
England mystic occurs in the sonnet entitled The Hand and
Foot:

The hand and foot that stir not, they shall find
Sooner than all the rightful place to go:
Now in their motion free as roving wind,
Though first no snail so limited and slow;
I mark them full of labor all the day,
264

Each active motion made in perfect rest;
They cannot from their path mistaken stray,
Though 'tis not theirs, yet in it they are blest;
The bird has not their hidden track found out,
The cunning fox though full of art he he;
It is the way unseen, the perfect rout,
Wherever bound, yet thou art ever free;
The path of Him, whose perfect law of love
Bids spheres and atoms in just order move.

The first two lines of the poem imply an initial choice, and thus
might be considered to be in agreement not only with colloquial
Calvinism, but also with the Friends and with Emerson. The last
three lines, however, are deterministic, and put the orthodox
stamp on the statement; the twelfth line is in effect a paraphrase
of various passages to be found in certain earlier Puritan theo-
logians. Thus John Norton wrote in 1654: "The liberty of man,
though subordinate to God's decree, freely willeth the very same
thing and no other than that which it would have willed if (upon
a supposition of impossibility) there had been no decree. " And
again: "Man acts freely as if there were no decree; yet as in-
fallibly as if there were no liberty." 3 And Isaac Chauncey, writ-
ing in 1694, says that God's decree "maintains the liberty of the
creature's will, that all free agents act as freely according to the
decree as agents of necessity do act necessarily." 4 It is curious
to observe that the resolution of the two discordant concepts of
free choice and of predestination, as it appears in the theologians,
is purely verbal; it was the result of the inability of the Puritans
to establish a genuine resolution that their Church declined; yet
in the poem, while one is reading the poem, the resolution is
experienced, or to put it otherwise the conviction felt by the poet
is communicated. I should not like to leave this poem without
calling attention to the haunting precision with which feeling as

*The Orthodox Evangelist by John Norton; quoted from History of New
England Theology, by Frank Hugh Foster (University of Chicago Press,
1909), first chapter.

4 The Doctrine Which Is According to Godliness, by Isaac Chauncey, 1694;
from Foster, first chapter.

265

well as dogma is rendered; lines nine to twelve are exceptionally
beautiful.

Very saw in the surrender to God of the will not only the
means of salvation, but the sole act of the will acceptable as an
act of devotion. Similarly, Edwards, from the more strictly Cal-
vinistic point of view, saw in the doctrine of predestination the
only doctrine that tended adequately to the glory of God: "Hence
these doctrines and schemes of divinity that are in any respect
opposite to such an absolute and universal dependence upon
God, derogate from his glory, and thwart the design of our re-
demption. And such are those schemes that . . . own an entire
dependence upon God for some things, but not for others; they
own that we depend on God for the Gift and Acceptance of a
Redeemer, but deny so absolute a dependence on him for the
obtaining an interest in the Redeemer. . . . They own a de-
pendence on God for the means of Grace, but not so absolutely
for the success." 5

Edwards seems to be guilty of the heresy which he is attacking;
that is, "trust wi a covenant of works"; for were the dependence
absolute, no doctrine could thwart our redemption, and no theo-
logian need come to aid us. It was in the same spirit that Edwards
brought about a revival in the Puritan Church, that is, induced
large numbers of sinners to repent, by preaching in language of
almost unequalled magnificence and terror the doctrine of pre-
destination and of the inability to repent. It was in the same spirit
that the Mathers took it upon themselves to rid New England
of witches. For the exercise of the will, the sense of the moral
drama, was not at first weakened by the impact of Calvinistic
dogma, but was excited by the new exaltation of spirit, and as
the will was excited, so was the study of its proper use neglected
by a doctrine which denied it and which relegated a belief in the
efficaciousness of good works to the category of sin, and this dis-
crepancy led at times to intense and mystical piety on the one
hand, and frequently to brutal bigotry on the other, the two often
existing in a single man, as in Cotton Mather.

6 God Glorified in Man's Redemption, by Jonathan Edwards, 1731; from
Foster, Chapter II; Edwards' Works, Dwight's Edition, Vol. VII, page 149.

266

In Emerson the exercise of the will is as active as ever, and his
moral judgments are frequently made with force and with accu-
racy; but his central doctrine is that of submission to emotion,
which for the pantheist is a kind of divine instigation: an inad-
missible doctrine, for it eliminates at a stroke both choice and
the values that serve as a basis for choice, it substitutes for a
doctrine of values a doctrine of equivalence, thus rendering man
an automaton and paralyzing all genuine action, so that Emer-
son's acceptable acts of expression are accidental poems or epi-
grams drawing their only nutriment from the fringe or from
beyond the fringe of his doctrine. To understand the difference
between Very and Emerson at this point, we are forced to en-
gage at least tentatively in that most precarious of pastimes, psy-
chological analysis. Very believed that he had surrended himself
to God, but it was to the God of Christianity, who disapproved
of surrender to emotion and whose moral standards had been
revealed; so that Very, if we assume for the moment that there
was an element of self-delusion in his mysticism, must have
engaged in a good deal of rapid, efficient, and scarcely conscious
criticism and selection of his own impulses, and on the basis of
traditional Christian morality; or if we assume that Very's faith
in his experience was justified, then it was the same God of
Christianity who guided him in fact, and presumably on the
same basis. Emerson, on the other hand, believed that flesh and
spirit were one, that the universe was divine, and that all im-
pulses were of divine origin. Emerson's personal acts, like those
of Very, were qualified by tradition, for he was the descendent
of a line of clergymen, and his character had been formed by the
society which they and their kind had formed, so that his im-
pulses were no doubt virtuous; but his doctrine abandoned the
last connection with Christianity and the last support for per-
sonal dignity, and the difference, though it does not appear in his
life as a man, is already apparent in the whimsical facility of
feeling to be discerned equally in his prose and in his verse, a
feeling very different from the austere purity of Very. Emerson
could write such a poem as Mithridates, for example, with
enough rhetorical vigor to make it an important part of our lit-

267

erary heritage, but with no realization of its implications; it
required Rimbaud, who probably never heard of the poem, or
Hart Crane, who probably derived the Emersonian influence in-
directly, and in some part through Emerson's chief disciple,
Whitman, to realize the implications of such an attitude in life
and in art.

Emerson was the most influential preacher to appear in Amer-
ica after Edwards, for the lecture platform was merely the ulti-
mate step in the secularization of the pulpit, a step that was
inevitable after Unitarianism had displaced Calvinism, and Em-
erson, moreover, succeeded in focussing upon his romantic amor-
alism a national religious energy which had been generated by
a doctrine and by circumstances now equally remote. And he was
the most widely read and most pungent aphorist to appear in
America since that other limb of the Devil, Benjamin Franklin.
The Church, and the spirit which had maintained it, were in
ruins; and the acceptance of Emerson's doctrine produced a new
spirit, foreign even to his own, or at least acting in regions be-
yond his comprehension and in ways that would surely have
troubled him.6 In Emerson's day, the practical, if illogical, Cal-

'This fact has been pointed out by H. B. Parkes (Emerson, Hound and
Horn V-4), a writer to whom I am more deeply indebted than I can indicate
in any series of footnotes, not only in respect to Emerson, but in respect to
other aspects of American thought. Parkes quotes Emerson as saying: "Success
consists in close appliance to the laws of the world and since those laws are
intellectual and moral, an intellectual and moral obedience;" and: "Money
... is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the accounts
of the world, and is always moral . . ." and: "An eternal, beneficent necessity
is always bringing things right." As Parkes adds of this notion, "Among the
Yankee farmers of Concord it had a little plausibility. But its effect was to
justify new forces, which were soon to destroy the society in which Emerson
lived." As an example of the justification to which Parkes refers, one might
mention that curious novel by Frank Norris, Tine Octopus. In spite of being
couched in an illiterate style trie book has extraordinary force: the plot displays
a series of related personal tragedies resulting from the impact upon individual
lives of a corrupt financial power. The financial magnate responsible justifies
his actions in Emersonian terms, and the author's representative in the story,
Presley, enlarges upon this justification in extensive passages that might have
been plagiarized from the Essays. Norris, however, was so little a literary
scholar that one is inclined to believe it more likely that he got these passages
from the philosophical atmosphere of his period than from Emerson's text.
There is likewise an episode in Melville's work entided The Confidence Man,
which appears to reflect this aspect of Emerson, but consciously and satirically:

268

vinism, which, as an historical fact, had enabled Hawthorne to
produce The Scarlet Letter, existed only in a few rapidly crum-
bling islands of culture, such as that to which we owe Emily
Dickinson; and the mystical Puritanism which had lived in Anne
Hutchinson and in Jonathan Edwards existed nowhere that we
can determine save in the spirit of Jones Very.

That Very should so long have been neglected, that he should
be left, a century after the production of most of his best poetry,
to the best defense that one, like myself, at every turn unsympa-
thetic with his position, is able to offer, is one of the anomalies
of literary history. Of the sincerity of his profession, we can hold
no doubt. His best poems are as convincing, and within their
limits as excellent, as are the poems of Blake, or Traherne, or
George Herbert. His contemporaries, those who regarded him not
only in the spirit, but in the flesh, paid his sincerity the highest
tribute that men can pay to that of any man: they adjudged him
insane. He voluntarily spent a short time under observation, but
was discharged. "At the McLean Asylum," says Emerson, "the
patients severally thanked him when he came away, and told him
that he had been of great service to them." It was during his
stay at the asylum that he finished his three essays in literary
criticism, which, whatever their faults, are beautifully written
and display great penetration and perfect presence of mind.

The attitude of the Transcendentalists toward Very is instruc-
tive and amusing, and it proves beyond cavil how remote he was
from them. In respect to the doctrine of the submission of the
will, he agreed with them in principle; but whereas they recom-
mended the submission, he practiced it, and they regarded him
with amazement. It is worthy of repetition in this connection, that
had Emerson accomplished the particular surrender which, as a
pantheist, he directly or indirectly recommended, he would have
been mad, that is, an automaton guided by instinct; that the sur-
render recommended by Emerson when carried no farther than
it was commonly carried by his disciples, that is, to an uncritical
exaggeration of the importance of temperament, led to the pas-

the episode of the mystic, Mark Winsome, and of his disciple, The India
Merchant.

269

toral idiosyncrasies of Thoreau, who valued a packing box as
highly as a house and a scrap of newspaper as highly as Homer,
or led to the mild idiocy of Alcott, who refused to eat root vegeta-
bles because they grew downward instead of aspiring upward;
whereas surrender in Very's terms— and we who have never prac-
ticed Very's surrender may reasonably refrain from offering any
doubts or other views as to the absolute truth of the terms— meant
an experience of a wholly different order.

James Freeman Clarke, in his biographical sketch of Very, has
thus described an encounter between Very and Channing: "I
was one day at Dr. Channing's house, when he had just received
a visit from Jones Very. Dr. Channing, like Emerson, was always
looking for any symptoms of a new birth of spiritual life in the
land. Having heard of Mr. Very, he invited him to come and
see him, and inquired what were his views on religious subjects.
Having listened attentively, he asked him whether it was in con-
sequence of his invitation or in obedience to the Spirit that he
came to Boston that morning. Mr. Very answered, 1 was directed
to accept your invitation/ Then Dr. Channing said, 1 observed
that during our conversation you left your chair and went while
speaking to the fireplace, and rested your arm on the mantel. Did
you do that of your own accord, or in obedience to the Spirit?'
Very replied, In obedience to the Spirit/ And indeed, if it has
become a habit of the soul to be led in all things, great and small,
why not in this, too? Only, I suppose, that most of us would not
think it worth while to consult the Spirit in such a purely auto-
matic action as this/*

That the gulf between Emerson and Very, if not wide, was
yet immeasurably profound, we may observe from one of Emer-
son's notes: "When Jones Very was in Concord, he had said to
me: 1 always felt when I heard you speak, or read your writ-
ings, that you saw the truth better than others; yet I felt that your
spirit was not quite right. It was as if a vein of colder air blew
across me/ He seemed to expect from me— once especially in
Walden Wood— a full acknowledgment of his mission, and a
participation in the same. Seeing this, I asked him if he did not
270

see that my thoughts and my position were constitutional, and
that it would be false and impossible for me to say his things or
try to occupy his ground as for him to usurp mine? After some
time and full explanation he conceded this. When I met him aft-
erwards, one evening at my lecture in Boston, I invited him to
go home to Mr. A's with me to sleep; which he did. He slept in
the room adjoining mine. Early next day, in the gray dawn, he
came into my room and talked while I dressed. He said: 'When
I was in Concord I tried to say you were also right; but the Spirit
said you were not right. It is just as if I should say, It is not morn-
ing, but the Morning says it is the Morning/ "

Surely no misunderstanding could have been more complete:
Emerson tried to explain to Very that truth is relative, and Very
tried to point out to Emerson that truth is absolute. Very had
been subjected to an overwhelming experience, and he was cer-
tain of what he had lived; Emerson had had no such experience,
but by trusting implicitly to the whimsical turns of his thought
he had arrived at certain beliefs regarding it. Emerson, who was
interested primarily in thought about the mystical experience,
and whose attitude toward thought was self-indulgent, could not
think clearly or coherently; and Very, whose thought was pre-
cise, if limited, whose attitude toward thought was ascetic, who
regarded thought as sin, save as directed by the Spirit, accom-
plished a life of nearly perfect intuition.

The absolute strangeness of Very to Emerson's group of friends
may best be shown by another passage from Emerson: "When
he is in the room with other persons, speech stops, as if there
were a corpse in the apartment/'

In the poem entitled Yourself, that is, addressed to the reader,
Very indicates his awareness of the difficulty that the outsider will
have in understanding the nature of his communion with the
Spirit:

But now you hear us talk as strangers, met
Above the room wherein you lie abed;
A word perhaps loud spoken you may get,

271

Or hear our feet when heavily we tread;
But he who speaks, or him who's spoken to,
Must both remain as strangers still to you.

We may accept Very's explanation of the imperfect audibility,
since he has every appearance of deep conviction; yet to us in the
lower room, he none the less remains imperfectly audible, and
if our life is to be passed in the lower room, we must concern
ourselves primarily with its conditions, lest, in the dark, we break
our heads against a door or a cabinet. But while recognizing that
Very's mystical poetry is imperfectly relevant to us, we may get
what we can from it, and since that which we can obtain is fre-
quently of great value, we can scarcely be losers in the relation-
ship.

To the fine anguish which Very suffered from his sense of
defilement in a sinful world, and to the strange conflict which
must have lived within him between this feeling— which, indeed,
is the only approach in his poems to a state of mind that might
be suspected of a quality of insanity— and the real humility which
appears in many of his poems, we may obtain a clue in the ex-
traordinary poem entitled .Thy Brother's Blood:

1 have no brother. They who meet me now

Offer a hand with their own wills defiled,

And, while they wear a smooth unwrinkled brow,

Know not that Truth can never be beguiled.

Go wash the hand that still betrays thy guilt;—

Before the Spirit's gaze what stain can hide?

Abels red blood upon the earth is spilt,

And by thy tongue it cannot be denied.

I hear not with the ear,— the heart doth tell

Its secret deeds to me untold before;

Go, all its hidden plunder quickly sell,

Then shalt thou cleanse thee from thy brothers gore,

Then will I take thy gift;— that bloody stain

Shall not be seen upon thy hand again.

272

That this sonnet embodies a personal experience, as we might
surmise from its tone of rapt obsession, and is not an idealized
statement, an address delivered dramatically, as it were, by the
Divine Spirit to fallen man, we may gather from Emerson, who
reports of Very's conversation as follows: "He says it is with him a
day of hate: that he discerns the bad element in every person
whom he meets, which repels him: he even shrinks a little to give
the hand, that sign of receiving/* 7 The word wills in the second
line represents a kind of theological pun: in the terminology of
traditional Christianity, it would mean willful sin; in the strict
sense of Very's mysticism, it would mean the exercise of the -will.
If we disregard this second meaning, the poem is in no sense
bound to Very's theology, but is comprehensible in traditional
terms; it is abnormal not in its thoughts but only in the intense
egocentricity of its feeling. This feeling might or might not verge
on insanity; it is, however, comprehensible as one extreme of reli-
gious experience; and it is here rendered with a purity, direct-
ness, and intensity but seldom equalled in English devotional
poetry.

The following poem, The Garden, is restrained and precise in
its imagery, and may conceivably find few admirers; an appre-
ciation of its beauty depends upon a realization of the mystical
significance, or some part of it, back of the description. Though
my own sympathy with the author's religious views is largely one
of a kind of hypothetical acquiescence, the poem nevertheless
seems very fine to me. Regardless of the intrinsic merits of the
piece, however, it is valuable as an introduction to certain other
poems in which the rapt contemplation of natural landscape is in
some measure offered as the equivalent, or at least as the best
available poetic substitute, for the contemplation of God achieved
by the mystic.

I saw the spot where our first parents dwelt;
And yet it wore to me no face of change.

'This passage and all others quoted herein from Emerson appear in his
Journals and are quoted by Andrews in his memoir of 1883.

And while amid its fields and groves, I felt

As if I had not sinned, nor thought it strange;

My eye seemed lout a part of every sight,

My ear heard music in each sound that rose;

Each sense forever found a new delight,

Such as the spirit's vision only knows;

Each act some new and ever-varying joy

Did by my Father's love for me prepare;

To dress the spot my ever fresh employ,

And in the glorious whole with Him to share;

No more without the flaming gate to stray,

No more for sin's dark stain the debt of death to pay.

The next poem, The Lost, is one of the author's four or five
most beautiful; it appears to go close to the heart of the mystical
experience, and in spite of the obscurity resulting is unforget-
table. The use of natural landscape in this poem and in one or
two others might seem to lend some support to the idea that Em-
erson had drawn Very toward pantheism, but the argument is a
weak one. First of all, mystical poets have always found them-
selves forced to employ analogy in dealing with the mystical ex-
perience: St. John of the Cross, as well as Crashaw in his great
poem on Saint Theresa, employed the analogy of sexual love, a
common analogy in Catholic tradition. Edwards, in telling of his
religious experience, tells of the intense pleasure that he received
from the contemplation of natural landscape: he exulted in this
physical beauty as the workmanship of God, but the feeling is so
intense that he appears at moments to see God in his works; the
attitude is something between the attitude of Very when he
writes in The Garden, "And in the glorious whole with Him to
share/' and Very in the more rapt and perhaps more confused
condition of The Lost, in which God and His Garden are scarcely
distinguished. The mystical experience is by definition incom-
municable; to the lay mind it may appear a form of self-delusion.
In any event, the inevitable technique of approximating it by
analogy, if one is to deal with it at all, leads of necessity to a meas-
274

ure of falsification in one way or another; this procedure is part
of the tradition of Christian poetry, and the fact that Very's
analogy led him in the direction of pantheistic imagery in a few
poems is insufficient to convict him qf pantheism, in the lack of
additional evidence, and in the face of the vast bulk of his ex-
plicitly Christian statement.

The subject of the poem is identity with God, and hence with
all time and place, of the divine life in the unchanging present
of eternity; or rather, the subject is the comparison of that life
with the life of man, "the lost." The nature of the state of beati-
tude is of necessity communicated but very imperfectly; the core
of the poem is a radiant and concentrated cloud of obscurity.
The longing for beatitude, however, is a normal and comprehen-
sible human experience, and though it is communicated largely
by indirect means in this poem, it is communicated with extraor-
dinary power. The obscurity, the imperfection, of the poem is
as slight as the treatment of the mystical theme permits; few
mystical poems, on the other hand, have expressed as wide a
margin of comprehensible experience, and few have been written
with such luminous directness and power. The mysterious and
subdued longing expressed in the poem culminates, perhaps in
lines five and six, and again in lines nine and ten, and the reader
may possibly work his way into the poem best by concentrating
for a moment on these lines:

The fairest day that ever yet has shone,
Will he when thou the day within shalt see;
The fairest rose that ever yet has hlown,
When thou the flower thou lookest on shalt he;
But thou art far away among Times toys;
Thyself the day thou lookest for in them,
Thyself the flower that now thine eye enjoys,
But wilted now thou hangst upon thy stem.
The hird thou hearest on the hudding tree,
Thou hast made sing with thy forgotten voice;
But when it swells again to melody,

The song is thine in which thou wilt rejoice;
And thou new risen midst these wonders live
That now to them dost all thy substance give.

The same subject and imagery recur in the poem entitled Today,
a lovely but less finished performance:

I live hut in the present,— where art thou?
Hast thou a home in some past, future year?
I call to thee from every leafy bough,
But thou art far away and canst not hear.

Each flower lifts up its red or yellow head,
And nods to thee as thou art passing by:
Hurry not on, but stay thine anxious tread,
And thou shalt live with me, for there am I.

The stream that murmurs by thee,— heed its voice,
Nor stop \hine ear; 'tis I that bid it flow;
And thou with its glad waters shalt rejoice.
And of the life I live within them know.

And hill, and grove, and flowers, and running stream,
When thou dost live with them shall look more fair;
And thou awake as from a cheating dream,
The life today with me and mine to share.

The New Man, a companion-piece to The Lost, which appears
only in the edition of 1886, like The Hand and Foot, the first
poem quoted in this essay, treats the converse of this theme, or
the experience of achieving salvation :

The hands must touch and handle many things,
The eyes long waste their glances all in vain;
The feet course still in idle, mazy rings,
Ere man himself, the lost, shall back regain
The hand that ever moves, the eyes that see,

276

While day holds out his shining lamp on high,

And, strait as flies the honey-seeking bee,

Direct the feet to unseen flowers they spy;

These, when they come, the man revealed from heaven,

Shall labor all the day in quiet rest

And flnd at eve the covert duly given,

Where with the bird they find sweet sleep and rest,

That shall their wasted strength to health restore,

And bid them seek with morn the hills and fields once more.

Much of Very's Nature poetry, especially of his later work, is
merely dull; the best of it resembles that of Blake, but is less
excellent. Nature, as in Blake, is seen through a daze of beatitude
and with only occasional clarity of outline. Nevertheless, there
are lovely passages. The following lines are from the sonnet en-
titled To the Pure All Things Are Pure:

Nature shall seem another house of thine,
When he who formed thee bids thee live and play,
And in thy rambles, een the creeping vine
Shall keep with thee a jocund holiday.

This passage is from The Song:

1 plunge me in the rivers cooling wave,

Or on the embroidered bank admiring lean,

Now some endangered insect life to save,

Now watch the pictured flowers and grasses green;

Forever playing where a boy I played,

By hill and grove, by field and stream delayed.

Equally lovely are The Wild Rose of Plymouth, The Fair Morn-
ing (as it appears in the edition of 1886), and The Lament of
the Flowers (which appears only in the edition of 1886), a curi-
ously haunting poem, too long to quote in full and too elusive to
quote in part. In Autumn Flowers, the natural description be-
comes a firm moral allegory; the poem is nearly one of the best.

277

Yet was there not some excuse for t4ie disturbed clergymen
of New England, who, when Very called upon them in their
studies and exhorted them to a more devout life, believed him a
madman? The clergymen did not represent civilization and the
moral life, exactly, but they represented what was left of civiliza-
tion and the moral life in New England— they were at least the
ruined dust of tradition— and Very, though a living spirit, was
primarily representative of something else. He was not mad, but
he existed in a state resembling madness from a strictly moralis-
tic point of view; he denied the existence, so far as practical be-
havior was concerned, of the whole world of judgment and of
choice; he was like Parmenides, who, having proven the uni-
verse by logic to be a perfect and motionless sphere, and having
observed about him a universe which did not conform to the
definition, pronounced the latter an illusion and turned his back
upon it forever.

But in that illusion we live from day to day; and in that life
of illusion we govern ourselves by judgment and by choice; and
should we deny or lose control of these, the illusion would be-
come a horror. A Very, a Traherne, or a Blake, is a luxury which
we can well afford so long as he refrains from making converts.
Should he convert us all, he would certainly be destroyed along
with us, or so, to us, in our darkness, it must needs appear. But
secure and unimpeded in our universe, which he deplores, he
expresses one limited aspect of our spiritual life, an aspect which,
to express well, he must live fully. The Roman Church has can-
nonized individual mystics, but has suppressed or excommuni-
cated the mystical sects.

But Very seldom preached, like Emerson; rather, he gave us
his life: he is a mystic, not a sectary and a reformer. It is true
that he argued with Emerson in the woods and with the clergy-
men in their studies, but the efforts were rare, brief, and private;
he had no access, such as Emerson had, to the general public, and
he sought for none. His poems sometimes employ the rhetorical
forms of exhortation, but the substance is the substance of per-
sonal experience: he expressed his own experience of beatitude,
or his longing for the experience, or his pity for us, the lost, the

278

dead. Emerson, if he was to concern himself with mysticism at all,
could do no other than reform, for he had no mystical life to give :
if we are to judge him by his writing, he never experienced that
which he recommended, and judged in his own terms he was a
failure. His poetry deals not with the experience, but Math his
own theory of the experience; it is not mystical poetry but gnomic
or didactic, poetry, and as the ideas expounded will not stand
inspection, the poetry is ultimately poor in spite of a good deal of
vigorous phrasing. Or to put it another way, Very speaks with
the authority of experience— and this holds true, even if we feel
less certain than Very as to the origin of the experience— whereas
Emerson claims to speak with the authority of thought, but he
lacks that authority.

Yet the measure of Emerson's failure may seem at times the
measure of the superiority of at least a little of his poetry to the
work of Very, at any rate to those of us who inhabit the lower
room, the chamber of illusions, and endeavor to keep it in order
that the mystic on the floor above us may suffer as little incon-
venient disturbance as possible. For Emerson's failure drove him
to examine at odd moments the broken shards and tablets buried
in his character from an earlier culture. He was by accident and
on certain occasions a moral poet, and he was by natural talent
a poet of a good deal of power. When we come from the more
purely mystical works of Very to The Concord Hymn, or to
Days, we may feel that we are entering a world of three dimen-
sions, of solid obstacles, and of comprehensible nobility.

But we have not done with Very so easily. Emerson at the core
is a fraud and a sentimentalist, and his fraudulence impinges at
least lightly upon everything he wrote: when it disappears from
the subject, it lingers in the tone; even when he brings his very
real talent to bear upon a thoroughly sound subject, he does so
with a manner at once condescending and casual, a manner of
which the justification, such as it is, may be found in his essays,
but of which the consequence is a subtle degradation of the
poetic art. Very at the core is a saint; though he is no more often
successful than is many another poet, yet he invariably gives the
impression of a conscientious effort to render exactly that which

279

he has to say. Very believed that his poems, like his actions, were
dictated by a higher power; but, as I have already shown, the
power was not the same as that to which Emerson owed alle-
giance. Very's poetry, like his life, was founded on a belief in
Absolute Truth; and either Very (without perhaps wholly re-
alizing it), or the Power that directed him, displayed the con-
science, the seriousness, of the artist.

When he brings his character to bear upon matters that we can
understand, we find ourselves, for all our doubts, in the presence
of one of the finest devotional poets in English. The following
poem, The Created, is probably the best single poem that Very
composed:

There is naught for thee by thy haste to gain;

'Tis not the swift with me that win the race;

Through long endurance of delaying pain,

Thine opened eye shall see thy Fathers face;

Nor here nor there, where now thy feet would turn,

Thou ibilt find Him who ever waits for thee;

But let obedience quench desires that burn,

And where thou art thy Father too will be.

Behold! as day by day the spirit grows,

Thou seest by inward light things hid before;

Till what God is, thyself. His image shows;

And thou wilt wear the robe that first thou wore,

When bright with radiance from his forming hand,

He saw the lord of all His creatures stand.

We have here perfection of structure, perfection and power of
phrase, great moral scope, at least by way of generality of im-
plication, and sublimity of conception. The intention of this
poem must have been purely Calvinistic; yet the second quatrain,
in which the Calvinism is most explicit, is stated in terms so
general that it might equally well be interpreted as a traditional
recommendation of humility and endurance; the term, "inward
light/* though it is a more or less technical term of Calvinism
and of Quietism, has figuratively a very wide applicability; the

280

third line of the poem, though it is in the tradition of Calvinistic
exhortation, exceeds any rigorous and literal interpretation of Cal-
vinistic dogma, for it recommends a course of action as a means
to salvation. In this poem, then, we see the religious experience
expressed fully and richly, unhampered by the heretical dogmas
of the author.

Nor is the vision of the resurrection an obstacle to the non-
believer, for it may, as in so much devotional but non-mystical
poetry, be accepted merely as an allegorical representation of a
moral state— of the condition of Socrates just before drinking the
hemlock instead of a few hours later.

Equally perfect, but of less power, is a hymn entitled The
Visit; nearly as perfect is a song, The Call, of which the last
stanza is missing from the edition of 1883; less perfect still, and
less compact, but of a magnificence at moments comparable to
that of Henry Vaughan, is a hymn entitled The Coming of the
Lord. There are other poems, which, because of imperfections or
limitations of scope, are of secondary importance, but which are
still worthy of examination: The Presence, The Still-Born (which
appears only in the edition of 1886), The Son, In Him We Live,
The Earth, The New Birth, The New World, The Morning
Watch, The Dead, The Prison, Enoch, and The Cottage; and
there are doubtless others.

I might endeavor to illustrate Very's genius further by the quo-
tation of a good many fine lines from the poems I have just men-
tioned, but the procedure would be largely unjust, for Very is
not a poet of separable moments; his poems are reasoned and
coherent, and the full force of a passage will be evident only
when one meets it in the context.8 Further, there is a quality of
intense personal conviction in Very, a kind of saturation with his
subject and his feeling, which one tends to lose in a brief passage;
it is a conviction so extraordinary that in some of his secondary
achievements it is able to carry a considerable weight of stero-
typed language without the destruction of the poem. To appre-
ciate the finer shades of his statement one should be familiar,

8 See page 344.

28l

moreover, with his work as a whole, for he is essentially a theo-
logical poet, and his references to doctrine are on the one hand
fleeting and subtle, and on the other hand of the utmost im-
portance to a perception of his beauty; and in addition, his finest
effects are the result of fine variations in tone, the appreciation
of which must of necessity depend in a large measure upon a
consciousness of the norm from which the variations occur.

Very numbered among his admirers the elder W. E. Channing,
Emerson, Clarke, Andrews, Norton, Hawthorne, Bryant, and
other persons of distinction; his contemporaries repeatedly com-
pared him to George Herbert, and it would appear with at least
a show of reason. Yet for fifty years he has rested in oblivion,
except as a name, incorrectly described, in the academic sum-
maries of his period. It is now fifty-seven years since his death,
and a hundred years since he first entered upon his full poetic
power; we are now very close to the centenary of his confinement
to the asylum at Somerville. In this last, at least, it should be
possible to find some significance that will justify our recalling
him to memdry. Perhaps the moral is merely this : that it is nearly
time that we paid him the apology long due him and established
him clearly and permanently in his rightful place in the history
of our literature.

282

EMILY DICKINSON

and The Limits of Judgment

Antiquest felt at noon
When August, burning low,
Calls forth this spectral canticle,
Repose to typify.

WHEN THE POEMS of Emily Dickinson first began to appear, in
the years shortly following her death, she enjoyed a period of
notoriety and of semi-popularity that endured for perhaps ten
years; after about ten years of semi-obscurity, her reputation was
revived with the publication of The Single Hound, and has lasted
unabated to the present day, though with occasional signs that it
may soon commence to diminish. A good many critics have re-
sented her reputation, and it has not been hard for them to jus-
tify their resentment; probably no poet of comparable reputation
has been guilty of so much unpardonable writing. On the other
hand, one cannot shake off the uncomfortable feeling that her
popularity has been mainly due to her vices; her worst poems are
certainly her most commonly praised, and as a general matter,
great lyric poetry is not widely read or admired.

The problem of judging her better poems is much of the time
a subtle one. Her meter, at its worst— that is, most of the time-
is a kind of stiff sing-song; her diction, at its worst, is a kind of
poetic nursery jargon; and there is a remarkable continuity of
manner, of a kind nearly indescribable, between her worst and
her best poems. The following poem will illustrate the defects in
perfection :

Z like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,

And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop— docile and omnipotent—
At its own stable door.

The poem is abominable; and the quality of silly playfulness
which renders it abominable is diffused more or less perceptibly
throughout most of her work, and this diffusion is facilitated by
the limited range of her metrical schemes.

The difficulty is this: that even in her most nearly perfect
poems, even in those poems in which the defects do not intrude
momentarily in a crudely obvious form, one is likely to feel a
fine trace of her countrified eccentricity; there is nearly always a
margin of ambiguity in our final estimate of even her most ex-
traordinary work, and though the margin may appear to dimin-
ish or disappear in a given reading of a favorite poem, one feels
no certainty that it will not reappear more obviously with the
next reading. Her best poems, quite unlike the best poems of Ben
Jonson, of George Herbert, or of Thomas Hardy, can never be
isolated certainly and defensibly from her defects; yet she is a
poetic genius of the highest order, and this ambiguity in one's
feeling about her is profoundly disturbing. The following poem
is a fairly obvious illustration; we shall later see less obvious:
284

I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me,

And frigates in the upper floor
Extended hempen hands,
Presuming me to loe a mouse
Aground, upon the sands.

But no man moved me till the tide
Went past my simple shoe,
And past my apron and my belt,
And past my bodice too,

And made as he would eat me up
As wholly as a dew
Upon a dandelions sleeve—
And then I started too.

And he— he followed close behind;
I felt his silver heel
Upon my ankle,— then my shoes
Would overflow with pearl.

Until we met the solid town,
No man he seemed to know;
And bowing with a mighty look
At me, the sea withdrew.

The mannerisms are nearly as marked as in the first poem,
but whereas the first poem was purely descriptive, this poem is
allegorical and contains beneath the more or less mannered sur-
face an ominously serious theme, so that the manner appears in
a new light and is somewhat altered in effect. The sea is here the
traditional symbol of death; that is, of all the forces and quali-

285

ties in nature and in human nature which tend toward the disso-
lution of human character and consciousness. The playful pro-
tagonist, the simple village maiden, though she speaks again in
the first person, is dramatized, as if seen from without, and her
playfulness is somewhat restrained and formalized. Does this
formalization, this dramatization, combined with a major sym-
bolism, suffice effectually to transmute in this poem the quality
discerned in the first poem, or does that quality linger as a fine
defect? The poem is a poem of power; it may even be a great
poem; but this is not to answer the question. 1 have never been
able to answer the question.

Her poetic subject matter might be subdivided roughly as fol-
lows: natural description; the definition of moral experience,
including the definition of difficulties of comprehension; and
mystical experience, or the definition of the experience of "im-
mortality," to use a favorite word, or of beatitude. The second
subdivision includes a great deal, and her best work falls within
it; I shall consider it last. Her descriptive poems contain here
and there brilliant strokes, but she had the hard and uncompro-
mising approach to experience of the early New England Calvin-
ists; lacking all subtlety, she displays the heavy hand of one unac-
customed to fragile objects; her efforts at lightness are distressing.
Occasionally, instead of endeavoring to treat the small subject
in terms appropriate to it, she endeavors to treat it in terms appro-
priate to her own temperament, and we have what appears a
deliberate excursion into obscurity, the subject being inadequate
to the rhetoric, as in the last stanza of the poem beginning, "At
half-past three a single bird" :

At half-fast seven, element

Nor implement was seen,

And place was where the presence was,

Circumference between.

The stanza probably means, roughly, that bird and song alike
have disappeared, but the word "circumference," a resonant and
impressive one, is pure nonsense.
286

This unpredictable boldness in plunging into obscurity, a bold-
ness in part, perhaps, inherited from the earlier New Englanders
whose sense of divine guidance was so highly developed, whose
humility of spirit was commonly so small; a boldness dramatized
by Melville in the character of Ahab; this congenital boldness
may have led her to attempt the rendering of purely theoretic
experience, the experience of life after death. There are numer-
ous poems which attempt to express the experience of posthu-
mous beatitude, as if she were already familiar with it; the poetic
terms of the expression are terms, either abstract or concrete, of
human life, but suddenly fixed, or approaching fixation, as if at
the cessation of time in eternity, as if to the dead the living world
appeared as immobile as the dead person appears to the living,
and the fixation frequently involves an element of horror:

Great streets of silence led away
To neighborhoods of pause;
Here was no notice, no dissent,
No universe, no laws.

By clocks 'twas morning, and for night
The bells at distance called;
But epoch had no basis here,
For period exhaled.

The device here employed is to select a number of terms rep-
resenting familiar abstractions or perceptions, some of a com-
monplace nature, some relatively grandiose or metaphysical, and
one by one to negate these terms; a number of statements, from
a grammatical point of view, have been made, yet actually no
concrete image emerges, and the idea of the poem— the idea of
the absolute dissidence of the eternal from the temporal— is stated
indirectly, and, in spite of the brevity of the poem and the gnomic
manner, with extraordinary redundancy. We come painfully
close in this poem to the irresponsible playfulness of the poem
about the railway train; we have gone beyond the irresponsible
obscurity of the poem about the bird.

287

This is technically a mystical poem: that is, it endeavors to
render an experience— the rapt contemplation, eternal and im-
movable, which Aquinas describes as the condition of beatitude
—which is by definition foreign to all human experience, yet to
render it in terms of a modified human experience. Yet there is
no particular reason to believe that Emily Dickinson was a mystic,
or thought she was a mystic. The poems of this variety, and
there are many of them, appear rather to be efforts to drama-
tize an idea of salvation, intensely felt, but as an idea, not as
something experienced, and as an idea essentially inexpressible.
She deliberately utilizes imagery irrelevant to the state with
which she is concerned, because she cannot do otherwise; yet the
attitude toward the material, the attitude of rapt contemplation,
is the attitude which she presumably expects to achieve toward
something that she has never experienced. The poems are in-
variably forced and somewhat theoretical; they are briskly clever,
and lack the obscure but impassioned conviction of the mystical
poems of Very; they lack the tragic finality, the haunting sense
of human isolation in a foreign universe, to be found in her
greatest poems, of which the explicit theme is a denial of this
mystical trance, is a statement of the limits of judgment.

There are a few curious and remarkable poems representing a
mixed theme, of which the following is perhaps the finest ex-
ample:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held lout just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in a ring;

288

We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
1 first surmised the horses heads
Were toward eternity.

In the fourth line we find the familiar device of using a major ab-
straction in a somewhat loose and indefinable manner; in the last
stanza there is the semi-playful pretence of familiarity with the
posthumous experience of eternity, so that the poem ends un-
convincingly though gracefully, with a formulary gesture very
roughly comparable to that of the concluding couplet of many an
Elizabethan sonnet of love; for the rest the poem is a remarkably
beautiful poem on the subject of the daily realization of the im-
minence of death— it is a poem of departure from life, an intensely
conscious leave-taking. In so far as it concentrates on the life that
is being left behind, it is wholly successful; in so far as it attempts
to experience the death to come, it is fraudulent, however ex-
quisitely, and in this it falls below her finest achievement. Allen
Tate, who appears to be unconcerned with this fraudulent ele-
ment, praises the poem in the highest terms; he appears almost to
praise it for its defects : * "The sharp gazing before grain instils into
nature a kind of cold vitality of which the qualitative richness has
infinite depth. The content of death in the poem eludes forever
any explicit definition . . . she has presented a typical Christian
theme in all its final irresolution, without making any final state-
ment about it." The poem ends in irresolution in the sense that
it ends in a statement that is not offered seriously; to praise the

1 Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas, by Allen Tate. Scribners, 1936.
The essay on Emily Dickinson.

289

poem for this is unsound criticism, however. It is possible to solve
any problem of insoluble experience by retreating a step and de-
fining the boundary at which comprehension ceases, and by then
making the necessary moral adjustments to that boundary; this
in itself is an experience both final and serious, and it is the ex-
perience on which our author's finest work is based.

Let me illustrate by citation. The following poem defines the
subject which the mystical poems endeavor to conceal : the soul
is taken to the brink of the incomprehensible, and is left there,
for retreat is impossible, and advance is impossible without a
transmutation of the soul's very nature. The third and fourth
lines display the playful redundancy of her weaker poems, but
the intrusion of the quality here is the result of habit, and is a
minor defect; there is nothing in the conception of the poem de-
manding a compromise. There is great power in the phrasing of
the remainder of the poem, especially in the middle stanza:

Our journey had advanced;
% Our feet were almost come

To that odd fork in Beings road,
Eternity by term.

Our face took sudden awe,
Our feet reluctant led.
Before were cities, but between
The forest of the dead.

Retreat was out of hope,—
Behind, a sealed route,
Eternity's white flag before,
And God at every gate.

She is constantly defining the absolute cleavage between the
living and the dead. In the following poem the definition is made
more powerfully, and in other terms:

fTwas warm at first, like us,
Until there crept thereon
290

A chill, like frost upon a glass,
Till all the scene be gone.

The forehead copied stone,
The fingers grew too cold
To ache, and like a skaters brook
The busy eyes congealed.

It straightened— that was all-
It crowded cold to cold-
It multiplied indifference
As Pride were all it could.

And even when with cords
'Twas lowered like a freight,
It made no signal, nor demurred,
But dropped like adamant.

The stiffness of phrasing, as in the barbarously constructed fourth
and twelfth lines, is allied to her habitual carelessness, yet in
this poem there is at least no triviality, and the imagery of the
third stanza in particular has tremendous power.

The poem beginning, "The last night that she lived/' treats
the same theme in more personal terms; the observer watches the
death of a friend, that is follows the friend to the brink of the
comprehensible, sees her pass the brink, and faces the loss. The
poem contains a badly mixed figure and at least two major gram-
matical blunders, in addition to a little awkward inversion of an
indefensible variety, yet there is in the poem an immediate seizing
of terrible fact, which makes it, at least f ragmen tarily, very great
poetry:

And we, we placed the hair,

And drew the head erect;

And then an awful leisure was,

Our faith to regulate.

Her inability to take Christian mysticism seriously did not,
however, drive her to the opposite extreme of the pantheistic

291

mysticism which was seducing her contemporaries. The follow-
ing lines, though not remarkable poetry, are a clear statement of
a position consistently held:

But nature is a stranger yet;

The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,

Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, knoiv her less

The nearer her they get.

Nature as a symbol, as Allen Tate has pointed out in the essay
to which I have already referred, remains immitigably the symbol
of all the elements which corrupt, dissolve, and destroy human
character and consciousness; to approach nature is to depart from
the fullness of human life, and to join nature is to leave human
life. Nature may thus be a symbol of death, representing much
the same idea as the corpse in the poem beginning " 'Twas warm
at first, like us," but involving a more complex range of associa-
tion.

In the following poem, we are shown the essential cleavage
between man, as represented by the author-reader, and nature,
as represented by the insects in the late summer grass; the sub-
ject is the plight of man, the willing and freely moving entity,
in a universe in which he is by virtue of his essential qualities
a foreigner. The intense nostalgia of the poem is the nostalgia
of man for the mode of being which he perceives imperfectly
and in which he cannot share. The change described in the last
two lines is the change in the appearance of nature and in the
feeling of the observer which results from a recognition of the
cleavage:

Farther in summer than the birds,
Pathetic from the grass,
292

A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.

No ordinance is seen,

So gradual the grace,

A pensive custom it becomes,

Enlarging loneliness.

Antiquest felt at noon
When August, burning low,
Calls forth this spectral canticle,
Repose to typify.

Remit as yet no grace,
No furrow on the glow,
Yet a druidic difference
Enhances nature now.

The first two lines of the last stanza are written in the author's
personal grammatical short-hand; they are no doubt defective in
this respect, but the defect is minor. They mean : There is as yet
no diminution of beauty, no mark of change on the brightness.
The twelfth line employs a meaningless inversion. On the other
hand, the false rhymes are employed with unusually fine modu-
lation; the first rhyme is perfect, the second and third represent
successive stages of departure, and the last a return to what is
roughly the stage of the second. These effects are complicated
by the rhyming, both perfect and imperfect, from stanza to stanza.
The intense strangeness of this poem could not have been
achieved with standard rhyming. The poem, though not quite
one of her most nearly perfect, is probably one of her five or six
greatest, and is one of the most deeply moving and most unfor-
gettable poems in my own experience; I have the feeling of
having lived in its immediate presence for many years.

The three poems which combine her greatest power with her
finest execution are strangely on much the same theme, both as
regards the idea embodied and as regards the allegorical embodi-

293

ment. They deal with the inexplicable fact of change, of the ab-
solute cleavage between successive states of being, and it is not
unnatural that in two of the poems this theme should be related
to the theme of death. In each poem, seasonal change is em-
ployed as the concrete symbol of the moral change. This is not
the same thing as the so-called pathetic fallacy of the romantics,
the imposition of a personal emotion upon a physical object in-
capable either of feeling such an emotion or of motivating it in
a human being. It is rather a legitimate and traditional form of
allegory, in which the relationships between the items described
resemble exactly the relationships between certain moral ideas or
experiences; the identity of relationship evoking simultaneously
and identifying with each other the feelings attendant upon both
series as they appear separately. Here are the three poems, in the
order of the seasons employed, and in the order of increasing
complexity both of theme and of technique:

1

A light exists in spring
Not present in the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here

A color stands abroad

On solitary hills

That science cannot overtake,

But human nature feels.

It waits upon the lawn;
It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
It almost speaks to me.

Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,

294

Without the formula of sound,
It passes, and we stay:

A quality of loss

Affecting our content,

As trade had suddenly encroached

Upon a sacrament.

As imperceptibly as grief
The Summer lapsed away,—
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.

A quietness distilled,

As twilight long begun,

Or Nature, spending with herself

Sequestered afternoon.

The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone,—
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.

And thus, without a wing,

Or service of a keel,

Our summer made her light escape

Into the beautiful.

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,

295

That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes,, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 'tis like the distance
On the look of death.

In the seventh, eighth, and twelfth lines of the first poem, and,
it is barely possible, in the seventh and eighth of the third, there
is a very slight echo of the brisk facility of her poorer work; the
last line of the second poem, perhaps, verges ever so slightly on
an easy prettiness of diction, though scarcely of substance. These
defects are shadowy, however; had the poems been written by
another writer, it is possible that we should not observe them.
On the other hand, the directness, dignity, and power with
which these major subjects are met, the quality of the phrasing,
at once clairvoyant and absolute, raise the poems to the highest
level of English lyric poetry.

The meter of these poems is worth careful scrutiny. The basis
of all three is the so-called Poulter's Measure, first employed, if
I remember aright, by Surrey, and after the time of Sidney in
disrepute. It is the measure, however, not only of the great elegy
on Sidney commonly attributed to Fulke Greville, but of some of
the best poetry between Surrey and Sidney, including the fine
poem by Vaux on contentment and the great poem by Gascoigne
in praise of a gentlewoman of dark complexion. The English
296

poets commonly though not invariably wrote the poem in two
long lines instead of four short ones, and the lines so conceived
were the basis of their rhetoric. In the first of the three poems
just quoted, the measure is employed without alteration, but
the short line is the basis of the rhetoric; an arrangement which
permits of more varied adjustment of sentence to line than if the
long line were the basis. In the second poem, the first stanza is
composed not in the basic measure, but in lines of eight, six,
eight, and six syllables; the shift into the normal six, six, eight,
and six in the second stanza, as in the second stanza of the poem
beginning, "Farther in summer/' results in a subtle and beautiful
muting both of meter and of tone. This shift she employs else-
where, but especially in poems of four stanzas, to which it ap-
pears to have a natural relationship; it is a brilliant technical in-
vention.

In the third poem she varies her simple base with the ingenu-
ity and mastery of a virtuoso. In the first stanza, the two long
lines are reduced to seven syllables each, by the dropping of the
initial unaccented syllable; the second short line is reduced to
five syllables in the same manner. In the second stanza, the first
line, which ought now to be of six syllables, has but five metrical
syllables, unless we violate normal usage and count the second
and infinitely light syllable of Heaven, with an extrametrical syl-
lable at the end, the syllable dropped being again the initial one;
the second line, which ought to have six syllables, has likewise
lost its initial syllable, but the extrametrical us of the preceding
line, being unaccented, is in rhythmical effect the first syllable of
the second line, so that this syllable serves a double and ambigu-
ous function— it maintains the syllable-count of the first line, in
spite of an altered rhythm, and it maintains the rhythm of the
second line in spite of the altered syllable-count. The third and
fourth lines of the second stanza are shortened to seven and five.
In the third stanza the first and second lines are constructed like
the third and fourth of the second stanza; the third and fourth
lines like the first and second of the second stanza, except that
in the third line the initial unaccented position is filled and we
have a light anapest; that is, the third stanza repeats the con-

297

struction of the second, but in reverse order. The final stanza is a
triumphant resolution of the three preceding: the first and third
lines, like the second and fourth, are metrically identical; the
first and third contain seven syllables each, with an additional
extrametrical syllable at the end which takes the place of the
missing syllable at the beginning of each subsequent short line,
at the same time that the extrametrical syllable functions in the
line in which it is written as part of a two-syllable rhyme. The
elaborate structure of this poem results in the balanced hesita-
tions and rapid resolutions which one hears in reading it. This
is metrical artistry at about as high a level as one is likely to find it.

Emily Dickinson was a product of the New England tradition
of moral Calvinism; her dissatisfaction with her tradition led
to her questioning most of its theology and discarding much of
it, and led to her reinterpreting some of it, one would gather, in
the direction of a more nearly Catholic Christianity. Her ac-
ceptance of Christian moral concepts was unimpaired, and the
moral tone of her character remained immitigably Calvinistic in
its hard and direct simplicity. As a result of this Calvinistic tem-
per, she lacked the lightness and grace which might have en-
abled her to master minor themes; she sometimes stepped with-
out hesitation into obscurantism, both verbal and metaphysical.
But also as a result of it, her best poetry represents a moral adjust-
ment to certain major problems which are carefully defined; it is
curious in the light of this fact, and in the light of the discussion
which they have received, that her love poems never equal her
highest achievement— her best work is on themes more gener-
alized and inclusive.

Emily Dickinson differed from every other major New Eng-
land writer of the nineteenth century, and from every major
American writer of the century save Melville, of those affected
by New England, in this: that her New England heritage,
though it made her life a moral drama, die] not leave her life in
moral confusion. It impoverished her in one respect, however:
of all great poets, she is the most lacking in taste; there are in-
numerable beautiful lines and passages wasted in the desert of
her crudities; her defects, more than those of any other great
298

poet that I have read, are constantly at the brink, or pushing be-
yond the brink, of her best poems. This stylistic character is the
natural product of the New England which produced the barren
little meeting houses; of the New England founded by the harsh
and intrepid pioneers, who in order to attain salvation trampled
brutally through a world which they were too proud and too im-
patient to understand. In this respect, she differs from Melville,
whose taste was rich and cultivated. But except by Melville, she
is surpassed by no writer that this country has produced; she is
one of the greatest lyric poets of all time.

299

MAULE'S WELL

or Henry James and the Relation of Morals
to Manners

"Be careful not to drink at Maules well!" said he. "Neither drink
nor loathe your face in itl"

"Maule's welll" answered Phoebe. "Is that it with the rim of mossy
stones? I have no thought of drinking there— hut why not?"

"Oh" rejoined the daguerreotypist, "because, like an old lady's cup
of tea, it is water bewitched!"

—The House of the Seven Gables

THE MOTIVATING IDEAS of most of the novels of Henry James
might be summarized very briefly, and perhaps a trifle crudely,
as follows: that there is a moral sense, a sense of decency, inher-
ent in human character at its best; that this sense of decency, be-
ing only a sense, exists precariously, and may become confused
and even hysterical in a crisis; that it may be enriched and cul-
tivated through association with certain environments; that such
association may, also, be carried so far as to extinguish the moral
sense. This last relationship, that of the moral sense to an en-
vironment which may up to a certain point enrich it and beyond
that point dissolve it, resembles the ordinary relationship of in-
tellect to experience, of character to sensibility.

If we carry these generalizations a little farther into the spe-
cial terms of his novels, we find, however: that the moral sense
as James conceives it is essentially American or at least appears to
James most clearly in American character; that it can be culti-
vated by association with European civilization and manners;
that it may be weakened or in some other manner betrayed by an
excess of such association.

Superficially this description seems to omit the novels of the

300

brief middle period, in which most of the characters were British
and in which none were American; but actually these novels
are in nearly every case constructed in much the same terms, for
the "American" characteristics are given to certain personages,
and the "European" to certain others. This formula will be some-
what qualified as we proceed, but I believe that it is essentially
sound.

Now this particular kind of moral sense may have existed in
Europe as well as in America, but so far as James was concerned,
it was essentially an American phenomenon: in the first place,
I believe that I shall be able to show how a degree of intensity
of this moral sense was an actual and historical development in
the American context; in the second place, we have in James
the ultimate and rarefied development of the spiritual antago-
nism which had existed for centuries between the rising provin-
cial civilization and the richer civilization from which it had
broken away, an antagonism in which the provincial civilization
met the obviously superior cultivation of the parent with a more
or less typically provincial assertion of moral superiority. The
same theme obsesses Fenimore Cooper for a large portion of his
career, though conceived in terms less subtle; it is the same an-
tagonism which, from pre-Revolutionary days to the present, has
resulted in the attempt, unhealthy in its self -consciousness and in
its neurotic intensity, to create a literature which shall be utterly
independent of that of England; it is the same antagonism which
has led many of the compatriots of Henry James to disown him
as a foreigner because of his long residence abroad, and which
led his western contemporaries of the intellectual stamp of Clem
ens to despise James in turn for his cultivation and artistry. There
is further evidence that James conceived this moral sense to be
essentially American, moreover, in the fact that the moral phe-
nomenon and its attendant dramatic formula alike were first de-
fined in the early American period of his art, and that they were
most fully and richly developed in his last great^ masterpieces,
The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden
Bowl

The origin of this moral sense may be given briefly and with

301

fair certainty, though James himself nowhere defines it: it was
the product of generations of discipline in the ethical systems of
the Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic Churches, a product
which subsisted as a traditional way of feeling and of acting after
the ideas which had formed it, and which, especially in Europe
and before the settlement of America, had long supported it,
had ceased to be understood, or, as ideas, valued. The Anglo-
Catholic Church in New York and farther south, even before
the Revolutionary War, tended to rely upon society for its sup-
port, rather than to support society; it was the external sign of
the respectability of a class, and was scarcely an evangelizing or
an invigorating force. This phenomenon can be observed in the
social novels of Cooper, who views it benignantly; and it is men-
tioned specifically by Mrs. Wharton, whose approval is tempered
with comprehension, in the opening pages of The Old Maid. In
this condensed novel, Mrs. Wharton writes as follows: "The
Ralstons were of middle-class English stock. They had not come
to the colonies to die for a creed but to live for a bank account.
The result had*been beyond their hopes, and their religion was
tinged by their success. An edulcorated Church of England
which, under the conciliatory name of the 'Episcopal Church of
the United States of America/ left out the coarser allusions in
the Marriage Service, slid over the comminatory passages in the
Athanasian Creed, and thought it more respectful to say 'Our
Father Who' than 'Which' in the Lord's Prayer, was exactly
suited to the spirit of compromise whereon the Ralstons had
built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same in-
stinctive recoil from new religions as from unaccounted-for peo-
ple. Institutional to the core, they represented the conservative
element that holds new societies together as sea-plants bind the
seashore/* And a little farther on she writes as follows: "The
fourth generation of Ralstons had nothing left in the way of
convictions save an acute sense of honor in private and business
matters; on the life of the community and the state they took
their daily views from the newspapers, and the newspapers they
already despised."

The moral sense in question, however, might have been a

302

much weaker motive, and certainly would not have been an es-
sentially American motive, had it not been intensified through
the influence of New England. In New England, the Calvinistic
theology denied the freedom of the will and the efficaciousness
of good works— that is, it denied the importance of the whole
subject of morality, at least in formal doctrine— but at the same
time, as a result of its inner inconsistencies and of the practical
struggles of the Puritans, as I have shown in discussing Haw-
thorne, it dramatized and intensified the moral struggle in an
extraordinary manner. Throughout a relatively brief period, per-
haps for less than a century, the moral sense of New England as
a whole, and throughout a much longer period the moral sense
of large segments of New England, was both simplified and in-
tensified by Calvinistic ideas, at the same time that these ideas,
because of their inner contradictions, and as they worked, under
the emotional pressure of the period, in the minds of the subtler
theologians, were literally proving self-destructive. By 1730 the
ideas were become so widely ineffective as to alarm the surviving
faithful. The preachers of the Great Awakening gave them a
renewed energy, in part intellectual, but primarily emotional, but
the new energy, being factitious, the result of the impact of a
new rhetoric rather than of a new clarification, was short-lived.
Edwards gave them a new and powerful intellectual adjustment,
but the adjustment was among the ideas themselves, and scarcely
clarified the increasingly obvious discrepancies between the ideas
and daily life, so that daily life moved on and left them. The
ideas killed themselves off, except as they existed, half-under-
stood, in the remoter village congregations; but the emotional
energy, the New England conscience, was longer in dying. It
gave the Unitarian Church its principal claim to dignity; it per-
sisted even in Emerson, as a private citizen, at the same time that
Emerson was preaching pantheism, equivalence, and surrender
to instinct.

Now except for the Mormon community of Utah, New Eng-
land was the only part of America in which a church ever exer-
cised a formative and governing influence upon society, so that
for certain periods in American history the adjectives Puritan

3°3

and New England are practically interchangeable. Further, New
England until well into the nineteenth century provided the
schoolmasters for most of the United States. Van Wyck Brooks
comments upon this fact in The Flowering of New England;1
he says: "Edward Everett Hale relates that a certain French in-
vestigator, sent by Napoleon III to study American education,
found that virtually every teacher in the West and South had
come from one small corner of the couhtry, either Connecticut
or Massachusetts. He asked Hale to explain this fact, which he
said was unique in history. Hale, to settle the question, enquired
of a leading citizen of Massachusetts how many young people
of his town, when they left school, began as teachers. 'He heard
me/ says Hale, 'with some impatience, and then said, 'Why all
of them, of course/* ' " Brooks cites Emerson, in addition, as ad-
vising "his fellow-townsmen to manufacture school-teachers and
make them the best in the world/' If one has ever read Satans-
toe, by Fenimore Cooper, one will scarcely forget Jason New-
come, the New England schoolmaster who settled in New York,
nor the inability of Corny Littlepage, the New Yorker, to under-
stand Jason's belief that the calling of the schoolmaster was both
respectable and enviable; this in spite of the fact that Jason rep-
resented the New England conscience in a degraded form, that
of the caution of the hypocrite.

Further, New England until the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury not only produced at least a fair proportion of the political
talent of. the nation, but she produced nearly all of the major
literary talent. If we except Poe, a Southerner, whose literary
merit nppears to the present writer to be a very frail delusion;
it we except Irving, a charming writer, but a minor writer at best;
if we except Cooper, a great writer, and a New Yorker without
mitigation; we have but two great New York talents after Freneau
and preceding the Civil War: W. C. Bryant, a New Englander
in origin, who wrote most of his best work before leaving New
England; and Herman Melville, whose father and grandfather
were born in New England, whose mother came of an old

1 The Flowering of New England, by Van Wyck Brooks, Button, 1936; page
252.

304

New York family, who was himself born and raised in New
York, yet all of whose work was profoundly colored by New Eng-
land, and whose greatest work was an allegorical epic of New
England. The influence of New England upon the spiritual life
of the nation till about 1850 or 1860 may thus be conceded to
have been extremely great; as a matter of fact it continued much
later, though with diminishing force. The most remarkable evi-
dence of its later continuance is the work of Henry James, an-
other New Yorker; and of this continuance there is ample objec-
tive evidence, in such characters as Lambert Strether, in that
unforgettable legend of New England, The Europeans, perhaps
the most beautiful of James's minor works, and omitted from the
definitive edition for reasons that must always remain obscure to
me, and even in The Bostonians— for had he not been as familiar
with the New England conscience as with his own, he could
scarcely have written such a work— and without recourse to the
historical summary and ethical analysis of which this essay will
consist.

For practical purposes, the New England moral sense was
merely an intensification of that of New York; like that of New
York it derived ultimately from the pre-American Catholic dis-
cipline, but unlike that of New York, or at least of English New
York, it had experienced a Calvinistic interlude, which intensi-
fied it, notwithstanding the fact that such an interlude, rationally
considered, ought to have destroyed it at the time, and notwith-
standing the additional fact that the interlude, historically con-
sidered, ultimately did destroy it, but long afterward, by severing
its connection with the one and only source of its nourishment,
the Aristotelian ethical tradition, as embodied in the Catholic
Church. The New England moral sense, then, might readily
enough be imposed in some measure upon the New Yorker, and
though it often appeared both obnoxious and ludicrous to him,
because of the very intensification in question, as we see it ap-
pearing in Satanstoe, in The Chainbearer, and in The Bos-
tonians, it none the less influenced and strengthened him in the
long run, or at least until it began to die in both environments.
Its death came through the increase of the temporal separation

305

from its source, through the corrupting influence of the anti-
moral philosophy of Emersonian and other romantics, through
dilution with the post-war inundation of uprooted immigrants,
through the reversion of influence from the uprooted Americans
who in tremendous numbers had broken with their traditions
and moved west, through the inundation of new and imperfectly
digested scientific knowledge, and through the influence of the
new financial aristocracy which had arisen after the Civil War
with great rapidity and by methods in most cases not only im-
moral and illegal and hence corrupting by way of example, but
causing a tremendous drain upon the spiritual life of the nation
through the material impoverishment of great multitudes.

This moral sense, as it existed about equally in James and in
his characters, then, was a fine, but a very delicate perception,
unsupported by any clear set of ideas, and functioning, not only
in minds of very subtle construction, but at the very crisis in
history at which it was doomed not only to be almost infinitely
rarefied but finally to be dissolved in air. Since James conceived
the art of the^novel primarily in terms of plot, and plot almost
wholly in terms of ethical choice and of its consequences; since
he raised the plotting of the novel to a level of seriousness which
it had never before attained in English; since all intelligent criti-
cism of James is resolved inevitably into a discussion of plot;
this moral sense, this crisis in history, will prove, I believe, to
be the source of the essential problem of James's art.

ii

James displays in all of his more serious work an unmistakable
desire to allow his characters unrestricted freedom of choice and
to develop his plots out of such choice and out of consequent
acts of choice to which the initial acts may lead. Now absolutely
considered, no human complex is ever free from a great many
elements which are without the control and even the under-
standing of the human participants. We may discover this fact
very simply if we consider for a moment A Portrait of a Lady.
We may fairly say that it is chance which brings Madame

306

Merle into the lite of Isabel Archer: at any rate, the entrance of
Madame Merle is a fact in itself of absolutely no ethical ante-
cedents or significance. On the other hand, we may say that the
actions of Isabel Archer are in certain respects and up to a cer-
tain point determined: she is first of all human, and is subject
to the fundamental necessities of humanity; being a normal
young woman, she is fairly certain to marry, for example. And
if she marries, she will in the matter of choice be limited by
chance— that is, she will have to choose from among the men
whom she happens to know, even if we suppose it to be within
her power to attract any man whom she desires. Her choice
within these limits may in a sense be said to be determined— as
perhaps it actually was— by a temperamental bent of her own
which she fails to understand and consider, or by the facts of
her personal history, which result in certain forms of knowledge
and certain forms of ignorance, and which may consequently
lead her to judge a situation on the basis of imperfect knowl-
edge. The initial tragic error of Hyacinth Robinson, of The Prin-
cess Casamassima, for example, is conceived as a free choice
made in ignorance of the essential knowledge which would have
prevented it; similarly, Mrs. Wharton's finest short work, Bun-
ner Sisters, is conceived as a sequence of steps taken by the two
protagonists into tragic knowledge, each step being made freely
and apparently wisely on the basis of the imperfect knowledge
held at the time it is taken.

Elements of this sort are what we call the given facts of the
plot: they are the ineliminable facts of character and of initial
situation. We have a certain group of particularized individuals
in juxtaposition; the particularity is destiny, the juxtaposition
chance. But the understanding and the will may rise in some
measure superior to destiny and to chance, and when they do
so, we have human victory; or they may make the effort and
fail, in which case we have tragedy; or the failure having oc-
curred, there may be a comprehension of the failure and a willed
adjustment to it, in which case we have the combination of
tragedy and victory. It is this combination, the representation
of which Henry James especially strives to achieve,

307

Some novelists— Defoe, for example, or Hardy— make a con-
scious effort to give the human participant the smallest possible
freedom of play; James endeavors to give him the greatest pos-
sible freedom, and he is so successful in the effort that in reading
one of his better novels one is conscious almost exclusively of
the problem of ethical choice.

Now the norm of human experience, in the matter of unham:
pered choice, is probably somewhere between the extremes of
Moll Flanders and of Isabel Archer, and the novelist who goes
to one extreme or the other simply refuses to consider intelli-
gently certain aspects of human life. There is possibly greater
educative value— there are wider ethical implications— in suffer-
ing the consequences of an ill-judged but unhampered choice
than in any other department of experience; on the other hand,
the person whose choice is normally unhampered may often ap-
pear to have an abominably facile existence in the eyes of him
whose life is an unbroken and unavailing endurance of neces
sity, whose primary virtue must of necessity be fortitude.

James sought in so far as possible, it would seem, to create
the illusion of unhampered choice, he sought to study the ethi-
cal judgment of his time and nation in the purest essence to
which he could distill it. This I believe to have been a limita-
tion, but of the two alternative limitations, if one is to choose
one or the other extreme, distinctly the lesser evil. Of the limita-
tion as such, I shall have nothing further to say; but it was also
the source of obscurity, and the nature of this obscurity, and the
nature of James's struggle to master it, will be the subject of this
examination.

James was abetted in his effort to isolate the moral problem
by the defects of his own knowledge: although he possessed the
most refined ethical sensibility of his period, and the sensibility
the most profoundly American, his education and background
were such that he knew very little of American life and man-
ners. With the American abroad he was familiar; with the
travelled American on his return, he was not unfamiliar; and
one could extend the catalogue to a few other particulars. But
he knew nothing of American economic life, a fact which he
308

recognized and deplored; and he knew next to nothing of the
daily detail, of the manners, of any single and reasonably repre-
sentative American class in its native environment, a fact which
will become abundantly obvious if one compares any of his
novels whatever to The Age of Innocence, by Mrs. Wharton.
His own childhood, under the guidance of his elegantly bohe-
mian father, familiarized him with an intellectual class, but with
a class consistent only in its intellectuality, and composed of in-
dividuals largely detached, as he saw them, from their social
backgrounds— his social experience was essentially amorphous.

In one of his letters,2 he addresses a correspondent as follows:
"I sympathize even less with your protest against the idea that
it takes an old civilization to set a novelist in motion— a proposi-
tion that seems to me so true as to be a truism. It is on manners,
customs, usages, habits, forms, upon all these things matured
and established, that a novelist lives— they are the very stuff
his work is made of." James was no doubt right in the general
proposition, for a novel requires bulk, and the bulk can be com-
posed only of a scrutiny of the daily detail of life; but the notion
that America did not offer any body of manners worth examining
was false, as the work of Mrs. Wharton, again, to go no further,
amply shows— James was simply insufficiently familiar with his
country or insufficiently observant of it.

In such a book as The Age of Innocence, Mrs. Wharton shows
us a group of characters whose actions are governed according
to the same ethical history and principles which I have men-
tioned in connection with James. But the characters are living
in a society cognate and coterminous with those principles; the
society with its customs and usages, is the external form of the
principles. Now the customs and usages may become unduly
externalized, and when they appear so to become, Mrs. Wharton
satirizes them; but in the main they represent the concrete as-
pect of the abstract principles of behavior. Thus when Newland
Archer and the Countess Olenska are on the point of eloping,
one of the strongest incentives to their withdrawal is the fact
that they will be forced into a mode of life of a bohemian and
a Letters, edited by Percy Lubbock, Vol. I, page 72.

3°9

disorderly sort which must inevitably degrade their love in their
own eyes; and this incentive is essentially serious, for the usages
which they are unwilling to abandon are the embodiment of
serious principles; whereas the usages which they are unwilling
to adopt represent a weak falling away from those principles.
In this way Mrs. Wharton gives greater precision to her moral
issues than James is able to achieve, for James endeavors, as I
have said, to isolate from the manners which might have given
it concreteness a moral sense which is already isolated by history
from the ideas which gave rise to it. Ellen Glasgow, in such
novels as They Stooged to Folly and Virginia, carries the pro-
cedure of Mrs. Wharton a step farther, and by the measure of
that step loses in seriousness: she shows her characters so domi-
nated by a system of manners, or so emotionally, so automati-
cally, in rebellion against a system of manners, as to be essen-
tially unconscious of their motives and so determined. She does
not give an untrue picture of life, for there are more people in
the world resembling Virginia and her husband than resembling
Newland Archer; but she gives a less complete picture of human
nature, for Newland Archer is a man of intelligence as well as
of sensibility.

In comparison with a Jamesian character, however, Archer
and Ellen Olenska are governed by circumstance; the Jamesian
character has greater freedom, in part because James couldn't
help it, and in part because he would no doubt have wished it
anyway. The moral issue, then, since it is primarily an American
affair, is freed in most of the Jamesian novels, and in all of the
greatest, from the compulsion of a code of manners.

The moral issue is also freed from economic necessity. Money
is never an impelling motive in a Jamesian novel ; that is, no one
is forced to choose, as Moll Flanders was forced to choose, be-
tween crime and starvation. On the other hand, a lack of suffi-
cient funds to live in luxury is a frequent motive to baseness
among the corrupt characters; Lambert Strether, in The Am-
bassadors, surmounts this temptation among others. The lack of
money may be sufficiently great to be a temptation; but it is never
sufficiently great to be compelling. Isabel Archer is benevolently

provided with funds after her story opens, with the express pur-
pose that her action shall thereafter be unhampered.

This necessity, in the Jamesian art, of seeing to it that the
leading characters shall be well-heeled, leads to some curious
paradoxes. Christopher Newman, of The American,, for exam-
ple, is a perfect embodiment of the Jamesian conscience, yet he
is a man of fabulous wealth, which he has acquired himself and
in a very few years, immediately following the Civil War, and
very largely in western railroads, and he is, in addition, a citizen
of San Francisco— he is, in brief, a colleague of Leland Stanford
and of Collis P. Huntington. James conceives nearly all of his
American financiers in the same terms, until he comes to write
The Ivory Tower, a book in which an intense suspicion, never
supported by exact knowledge, of the evil of American financial
life, of its actually corrupting effect on the characters of the par-
ticipants, is the explicit theme.

If we demand of a novelist that he portray a society accurately
as regards all its externals, this contradiction in Jamesian charac-
ter would be all but fatal to his art. We could justify it to a cer-
tain extent by saying that there were in the eastern United States
individuals of moderate wealth either inherited or otherwise hon-
estly acquired; that James erred only in the unnecessary exag-
geration of the wealth of his characters, in attributing to a man
of the character, let us say, of an Adams or a Phillips, the wealth
of a Sage or a Vanderbilt, in a period in which it is notorious
that such wealth could not be decently accumulated. We might
justify him to a certain extent by pleading the indisputable fact
that many men who are notoriously unscrupulous in matters of
finance or of politics preserve the domestic virtues intact; though
such an apology in the background of The Golden Eowl would
necessarily mitigate our sense of the tragedy of Adam Verver.

Such apologies would up to a certain point be sound, although
they would certainly be insufficient. The real objection to them,
however, is that they would be irrelevant; they would be offered
in defense of a misconception of the Jamesian art. For James is
definitely not examining the whole of a society; he is examin-
ing the mathematical center of a society— the ethical conscious-

3"

ness of a society— and he is examining nothing more. For the
rest, so far as his Americans are concerned, he is employing a
fictive convention, the convention of fabulous wealth fabulously
acquired and resulting in the freedom of the possessor from
necessity, in order to isolate the ethical consciousness in question
more perfectly than it is to be found isolated in life. In this re-
spect, his art approaches that of the allegorist, of the symbolic
poet: it is an art not of inclusion, but of representative and es-
sential selection.

We find, then, that James succeeded to a remarkable degree
in separating the problem of ethical choice from the influence of
ethical habit and of social pressure as they appear in the guise
of manners or of economic necessity. The consequences of this
success remain to be seen.

in

James, then, was unequipped to deal adequately with any major
aspect of Arfierican manners, yet he was a novelist of manners
by natural gift and by his own admission; he was furthermore
profoundly American in character. The problem was solved
naturally by the facts of his personal history: he dealt with the
American, uprooted from his native usages, and confronted with
the alien usages of a subtle and ancient society.

In the early works and in some of the minor works of later
years, the confrontation leads to curious results. Christopher
Newman may serve again as the illustration: there is not only
the paradox of his possessing a virgin New England conscience
along with a fortune acquired in western railroads, but there is
the additional paradox of his possessing the gentle flexibility of
a New England or New York aristocrat at his best, along with a
social naivet£ that irritates the Bellegardes. James in his effort to
indicate a part of the basis for this irritation writes certain scenes
in which Newman converses with a rural and moralizing gar-
rulity that puts one strongly in mind of Natty Bumppo.

In the more mature works, the relationship is, of course, stated
far more subtly. The Ververs are gentle and cultivated people,

who are circumvented by persons a shade less gentle and a shade
more cultivated, the fine degrees of difference, however, being
firmly indicative of an essential cleavage in character. Lambert
Strether is from the outset of The Ambassadors a person of great
astuteness of perception as well as of unusual character; Chad
Newsome, the character in this particular novel most profoundly
affected by the contact with Europe, starts out as a crude and
unformed boy, his crudity being largely accounted for by his age.
The difference is most obvious, perhaps, in the case of Isabel
Archer: she is, from the beginning, the social equal of any per-
son whom she encounters; but she is inexperienced, and her
exposure to Europe is an exposure to an unexpectedly rich and
extraordinary experience, which confuses her.

Nevertheless, from the beginning to the end of James, certain
major relationships are apparent.

There is the American who is subjected to the European in-
fluence and enriched by it; as examples, we may cite Ralph
Touchett of the Portrait, and Strether and Maria Gostrey of The
Ambassadors. There is the American who in the process of be-
coming so enriched, suffers a dissolution of his moral nature,
and who becomes merely a more or less conscious scoundrel: as
extreme examples of this type, we may cite Osmund and Mme.
Merle of the Portrait; as an example of a less conscious type of
corruption, we may cite Christina Light, especially as she ap-
pears in Roderick Hudson, less obviously as she appears in The
Princess Casamassima; Strether appears of this type to the New-
somes in Massachusetts; Chad Newsome appears of this type at
the outset of The Ambassadors, later appears of the admirable
type of Touchett, and at the end remains ambiguous and unre-
solved, a question for the future, in the eyes of the reader and
of Strether alike. There is the American who, in the process of
acquiring this valuable experience, is betrayed by another charac-
ter, whether American or native European, who has too much
of it, or conversely and proportionately too little moral sense:
such characters are Maggie Verver and her father in The Golden
Bowl, Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, Isabel Archer
in the Portrait, and (if we suspect a trifle the worst of Chad

Newsome) Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors. This formula
of betrayal is the tragic formula in the Jamesian novel : in a sub-
plot of The Ambassadors, there is (but only, again, if we suspect
the worst of Chad Newsome) a curious variation of it, in
which Chad, who has been enriched and so (perhaps) corrupted
through his experience with Mme. de Vionnet, appears (per-
haps) likely at the end of the book to betray Mme. de Vionnet,
who, though she is a European and though she has displayed
certain comprehensible human weaknesses, is a sympathetic
character. There are the Americans who are essentially too pro-
vincial, and who are frequently too coarse, to be subject either
to the benefits or to the dangers of the European experience:
these individuals are sometimes merely dull vulgarians, like Jim
Pocock of The Ambassadors; they are sometimes comic but sym-
pathetic figures like Waymarsh of The Ambassadors, or like
Henrietta Stackpole of the Portrait; they are sometimes admira-
ble in a very limited sense, but invidious in the long run to the
decencies, through their very limitations and a kind of neurotic
intensity, like Mrs. Newsome and her daughter, of The Am-
bassadors; more rarely, like Caspar Goodwood, of the Portrait,
they have a kind of tragic simplicity of directness in a world
essentially fluid, evasive, and incomprehensible, at least as re-
gards human motive. Goodwood is tragic because, though im-
perceptive, he has high character and high intelligence, and
because he unfailingly and in spite of constant disappointment
expects human beings to act intelligently; Henrietta Stackpole
has the same expectation, but lacking so fine an intelligence or
so high a character (though of course she is a very good soul in
her fashion) she is necessarily comic. The character immune to
European influence is never central to the Jamesian plot, and
seldom alters or develops to any serious degree in the course of
the book, though things may happen to him.

In the British novels of the middle period, the same precarious
balance between character and sensibility is studied, and from
the same hypersensitive American point of view, in spite of there
being no American characters. In The Tragic Muse, the solid
qualities and limitations of the British upper class replace the

3M

narrower and more intense moral qualities of the American heri-
tage; Dormer and Sherringham attempt to build a richer life on
this foundation, Sherringham to fail, Dormer presumably to suc-
ceed—the book, though it offers a handful of unforgettable char-
acters, collapses structurally as a result of its double plot, so that
one's recollection of the manners, or the medium in which the
characters move, is likely to be more clear than the morality, or
the form of their motion. In The Awkward Age, to select an-
other example, Nanda, Mitchy, and Mr. Longdon, the only char-
acters possessing sufficient moral quality to rely in some measure
upon it, are all more or less the victims of persons unable to
distinguish between morals and manners, of persons so external-
ized as to be essentially corrupt. In the British novels in general,
I should say, and especially in The Spoils of Poynton, this an-
tithesis of morals and manners appears less clearly than in The
American; in fact, in The Spoils of Poynton, the morality is
largely an isolated question, and stands only in the vaguest sense
in the usual relationship to manners.

Toward the end of his life, in The Ivory Tower, James re-
versed the formula. He appeared to be troubled by the corrupt-
ing influence of American financial life on those who were not
subjected to a civilizing influence. In this book, he employs as
hero a Europeanized American, Graham Fielder, a man of the
same admirable type as Ralph Touchett, but of much less force
of character. Fielder had been raised in Europe, apart from the
financial life in America; he was thus the heir in some measure
and perhaps in a diluted form of the earlier American moral
sense as well as of European cultivation. James brings him into
contact with the corrupt financial life of America early in the
twentieth century, shows him defeated in the realm of action by
an exemplar of this life, but rising superior to his adversary
morally. This form of corruption had, of course, been thriving
throughout James's career, and James had shown little suspicion
of its existence; even in The Ivory Tower he does not know ex-
actly what form the corruption takes, but merely feels its pres-
ence, as a kind of social atmosphere. However, the same corrup-
tion in the background of The Ambassadors—the same stupid

3'5

corruption which was sufficient to drive Henry Adams out of
political life— lends a certain seriousness to the choice which
confronts Chad Newsome, the choice between the life of a busi-
nessman in America and (since he lacks both the genius and
the character of a Henry Adams) the life of a cultivated idler
in Europe.

In general, however, the subject of the characteristic Jamesian
novel is the influence of the cultivation of sensibility (in other
words, the experience of contact with European manners) upon
moral character in a pure or isolated form (that is, upon the
American moral sense, divorced from any body of American
manners). The implications of this relationship of morality to
sensibility are of the most profound and the most general sort,
in spite of the fact that the concrete terms giving rise to the im-
plications are relatively limited. It is obvious, then, that James is
much more than a mere portrayer of the American abroad; his
work partakes in a considerable measure of the allegorical char-
acter of the work of Hawthorne. The principal dangers inherent
in the subject and in the method we shall now examine.

IV

Edmund Wilson in an essay in The Hound and Horn3 has de-
fended the theory that The Turn of the Screw should be re-
garded not as a ghost story but as a study of hallucination. The
story is told by the governess, who is to be regarded either as
the victim of the hallucinations or as the observer of the ghosts
and their machinations. If we assume that the children did not
see the ghosts— and we have only the word of the governess that
they did see them— their every action becomes innocent and
commonplace except, toward the end, as they are terrified by the
unbalanced behavior of the governess. There are a few small

8 The Ambiguity of Henry James, by Edmund Wilson; The Hound and
Horn, VII-3, April- June, 1934. A greatly extended version of this essay, which
I had not read till the present volume was ready for the printer, appears in The
Triple Thinkers, by Edmund Wilson, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938. My essay
and the enlarged essay of Mr. Wilson deal with many of the same problems,
but from very different points of view.

316

difficulties of interpretation either way, but Mr. Wilson's hy-
pothesis strikes the present writer as more plausible than the
popular one. As Mr. Wilson points out, the story is not published
among the ghost stories in the collected edition; there is another
story, The Marriages, which resembles it in method if we as-
sume the truth of his theory; resembles it in the fact that this
story is likewise told from the point of view of an unbalanced
girl, except that in this case the clue to the interpretation is given
explicitly at the end.

For the purposes of this essay, Mr. Wilson's interpretation
need not be granted, though I personally agree with it. But the
story if so interpreted— even if so interpreted only for a moment
—has great illustrative value. For in the story so interpreted, the
governess constructs out of a series of innocent and unrelated
acts, a consistent and coherent theory of corrupt action and a
very intense emotional reaction to the theory. The gap between
rational motive and resulting state of mind is so wide as to in-
clude every item in the story: for this reason, the governess must
be insane. There is more than one other Jamesian effort, how-
ever, in which the margin of unmotivated, or obscure, feeling
is nearly as wide, and apparently without James's realizing it;
there is almost invariably at least a narrow margin of obscurity;
and the entire drama of the typical Jamesian novel is the effort
of some character or group of characters to reduce this margin,
to understand what is going on.

Joseph Warren Beach4 describes The Sacred Fount in the fol-
lowing passage: "It consists of a series of discussions at a week-
end party concerning the sentimental relationships of certain
men and women present. Not a single incident is brought into
the narrative more important than the intimate look of two per-
sons observed together in an arbor, a gentleman's appearance of
age, or the waxing and waning of a lady's wit. The discussions
are held largely between 'me' and 'Mrs. Briss'; and the climax of
the story is found simply in the most extended of our debates,
late at night in the hospitable drawing-room. Each one of us has

* The Method of Henry James, by Joseph Warren Beach; Yale University
Press, 1918, pages 43-4.

developed an elaborate hypothesis to account for certain social
phenomena,— phenomena whose actuality may itself be brought
in question, being so much an affair of the interpretation (if not
the imaginative invention) of appearance. T hold that the pres-
ent wit and competence of Percy Long— heretofore a dull and
unskillful member of society— have had to be paid for by the
woman who loves him; and that this accounts for the nervous
manner and peculiar tactics of Mae Server, who has lost her for-
mer cleverness and is trying to conceal the fact. On the same
grounds I explain to myself the blooming of Mrs. Brissenden—
my opponent in this debate— at the expense of 'poor Briss/ who
daily presents an older face to the world. Toor Briss/ like Mae
Server, has had to tap the 'sacred fount' the limited source of
vital energy, in order to give abundant life to the one he loves.
Following this clue, it appears to me that Percy Long and 'Mrs.
Briss/ conscious of the similarity of their position, have formed
a tacit league for concealment and the defense of their common
interest. And again 'poor Briss' and Mae Server seem to have
been drawn together by a sense of their community and a com-
mon need for sympathy. It was Mrs. Briss in the first place who
helped me to my theory. But it is obvious that, when she comes
to realize how far I may carry its application, she must deny
these facts and make her own independent interpretation of the
facts she acknowledges. And Mrs. Briss is a most ingenious and
plausible debater. So that T am obliged to hurry away from her
neighborhood in order to maintain my own view of the facts.
And so, in the end, the reader is left provided with two complete
sets of interpretations of a group of more or less hypothetical
relations. . . ."

This is, I believe, a fair summary; it comes from one of the
most enthusiastic admirers of James, and, so far as my knowledge
of Jamesian criticism extends, from his ablest critic, albeit from a
critic with whom I frequently disagree. Yet we have here a sum-
mary of a state of mind that verges on madness, and the novel
was not ultimately included by the author in the definitive edi-
tion of his works.

Similarly, one may fairly ask whether Fleba Vetch, of The

318

Spoils of Poynton, does not do something similar to what the
governess does in The Turn of the Screw, though in the case of
Fleda, of course, it would be moral hysteria, if such a phrase
may be used, rather than madness. Fleda has it in her power
to break the engagement to marry another woman of the man
whom she loves and who loves her; the rival does not appear
to be so much in love with him as with his perquisites— in
fact, it is the rival herself who threatens to break if certain
demands are not granted within a limited time, and her atti-
tude appears to be one primarily of bad-tempered selfishness.
Fleda, notwithstanding, constructs a moral obligation out of this
situation, constructs it so deviously and subtly that it would be
utterly lost in summary and is sufficiently elusive in the text,
enforces the compliance, and assures the marriage, thereby, pre-
sumably, ruining her own life, her lover's, and that of her lover's
mother. The attitude of the lover, Owen Gereth, never becomes
clear: Mrs. Gereth appears to assume that it is, like Fleda's, one
of unwholesome moral refinement; when Owen discusses the
situation with Fleda, nevertheless, he appears primarily hurt and
bewildered, so that the reader is free to wonder whether he
simply performed a quixotic act to win Fleda's esteem in default
of her hand; Fleda, however, in a passage which is analytical
rather than emotional, deduces that he was repelled by his some-
what spoiled fiancee, when, as the result of a check, her action
became vulgar and unpleasant, and so imagined himself in love
with Fleda, but that when the check was removed and her charm
automatically returned, he was again moved to admire her and
forget Fleda— an hypothesis which would render Fleda's tragedy
a waste of passion in a vulgar cause, though of this Fleda, as well
as James, appears to be unaware. In any event, Owen remains
at the end of the story an unresolved figure, a group of at least
three mutually repellent hypotheses; the value of Fleda's action
is unjudged— Fleda herself was ready to surrender and in fact
tried to surrender when it was already too late and Owen was
married, but then apparently returned later to her original view
of the situation— so that Fleda represents a pair of alternative
hypotheses. The result of this uncertainty is that we do not have

3'9

a tragic moral victory, in which the protagonist judges, makes a
sacrifice, and saves her soul; nor do we have a tragic defeat, in
which she makes an unjustified choice and is judged by the
author— that is, suffers the consequences. We have rather an
intense situation, developed with the utmost care, so far as the
succeeding facts and states of mind are concerned, but remain-
ing at nearly all times and certainly at the end uncertain as to
significance. Fleda's attitude is never resolved; nor is ours; but
the experience has been intense, and as we have not understood
it, we cannot but feel it to be essentially neurotic and somewhat
beyond the margin of the intelligible.

The Awkward Age is another novel which very clearly illus-
trates the difficulty. This novel is usually one of the first at-
tacked by those who dislike the author, and it is in subject and
in treatment alike unquestionably one of the most tenuous. I
personally find it, as I find The Spoils of Poynton, and for
reasons to which later I shall allude briefly, both moving and
amusing in spite of the defects which I am considering, but that
fact for the moment is beside the point.

The book centers on Mrs. Brookenham, the guiding spirit
of a clever social group, and her daughter, Nanda, who as
the book opens, arrives at that age of formal and recognized
maturity at which she is permitted to "come down stairs," or
be one of her mother's guests. The circle in question is witty,
moderately intellectual, and accustomed to perfect freedom of
discussion. The question then arises whether conversation shall
be sacrificed to the young girl, or the young girl to conversation.
The latter, in a sense, occurs: that is, Nanda takes part in con-
versations, from which, according to dying but not yet dead tra-
ditions, a young girl should be guarded. Nanda is in love with
Vanderbank, a contemporary and apparently an old admirer of
her mother. Vanderbank is attracted to Nanda, but gradually
comes to feel that she is in some way spoiled by this exposure,
and turns away from her. Mr. Longdon, who had been in love
with Nanda's grandmother, to whom Nanda bears an exact phys-
ical resemblance, is necessarily attracted to Nanda, and tells
Vanderbank that he will provide Nanda with a considerable

320

dowry, in the hope of moving Vanderbank to marry her. This,
however, fails. Mitchett, a wealthy young man of no family and
of no looks, but of a character both fine and charming, loves
Nanda, but unsuccessfully; at her request, and as a kind of
pledge of his love for her, he marries her friend, Aggie, a young
girl who had been conventionally reared, and who after her mar-
riage becomes a lewd and vulgar little trollop; after the mar-
riage, one suspects also that Nanda suspects that perhaps she
had loved Mitchett without knowing it. Finally she goes off with
Mr. Longdon, either to be adopted by him, or to marry him,
presumably the latter. The situation is that of Daisy Miller in-
finitely rarefied: a young girl of moral integrity and of more or
less "natural" manner, though she is not in this case an Amer-
ican, violates a code of manners and is penalized very severely.

The situation turns purely on a point, and a very subtle one,
of manners; Nanda is delicate and sophisticated and a person of
the finest social perception, so that her sins are of the most nearly
imperceptible kind. It is a tragedy of manners, in which no genu-
ine moral issue is involved, but in which vague depths of moral
ugliness, especially in Vanderbank, are elusively but unforget-
tably suggested. Vanderbank is a creature through whose tran-
quil and pellucid character there arises at the slightest disturb-
ance of his surface a fine cloud of silt, of ugly feeling far too
subtle to be called suspicion, but darkening his entire nature and
determining his action. The tragedy far outweighs the motive,
and the relations between character and character are frequently
so subtle as to be indefinable. The endeavor to make the motive
serve in such a case no doubt accounts in part for the excessive
subtlety with which the characters scrutinize each other and the
whole situation; they continually try to find more in it all than
is really there, in the effort to understand their own feelings, or
rather to justify them. They remind one— and James, since his
plight for the moment is their own, likewise reminds one— of
Hawthorne scrutinizing Dr. Grimshaw's spiders with insanse in-
tensity, but with no illumination.

Mrs. Brookenham says: " The thing is, don't you think?'— she
appealed to Mitchy— Tor us not to be so awfully clever as to make

321

it believed that we can never be simple. We mustn't sec too tre-
mendous things— even in each other/ She quite lost patience
with the danger she glanced at. We can be simple!'

We can, by God!' Mitchy laughed.

Well, we are now— and it's a great comfort to have it settled/
said Vanderbank.

Then you see/ Mrs. Brook returned, 'what a mistake you'd
make to see abysses of subtlety in my having been merely nat-
ural/ "

And on another occasion Vanderbank says to Nanda: "You're
too much one of us all. We've tremendous perceptions/'

It is a remarkable evidence of the genius of James that though
most of the important actions in the story are either flatly in-
credible or else are rendered so subtly as to be indeterminable,
yet the resultant attitudes and states of mind of the actors are
rendered with extraordinary poignancy: the obscure, slow, and
ugly withdrawal of Vanderbank, the final scene between Mitchy
and Nanda, the final departure of Nanda and Mr. Longdon
(even though* one is none too certain of the exact nature of the
relationship to which they are departing) are, for myself, among
the most haunting memories which I retain from my fragmen-
tary experience as a reader of novels. Yet few memorable novels
are less satisfactory.

In order to indicate sharply the nature of the Jamesian ob-
scurity, I am purposely citing the most extreme examples of it,
before examining the manner in which it invades the more im-
portant works. I wish to conclude this phase of the discussion,
with an account of the most extraordinary plunge into pure in-
coherence which James ever made, the posthumous and unfin-
ished book entitled The Sense of the Past. Though the work is
unfinished, we possess the author's notes for the unfinished por-
tion, so that we have a very good idea of what would have hap-
pened.

The story deals with Ralph Pendrel, a young man of about
thirty years and some wealth, who has been prevented from visit-
ing Europe because of various personal obligations. Death, hav-
ing eliminated the last of these obligations, he goes. He is a kind
322

of amateur historical scholar, and he has published a monograph
on a theory of the historical approach. A distant relative in Eng-
land has read this monograph and admired it, and, dying just
before the visit to Europe, has bequeathed the young man a
house in London, which had been built early in the eighteenth
century. Pendrel visits the house immediately upon arriving, and
spends an afternoon and evening in the examination of it; an
examination in which he observes among other items the portrait
of a young man of the early nineteenth century, that is, of about
a hundred years before the initial action, which arouses his curi-
osity: the portrait is a three-quarters rear view of the head, so that
the features are not shown. Late in the evening the young man of
the portrait steps down, and the two meet and strike a bargain: the
young man of the portrait had always had great curiosity about
the future, just as Pendrel has had about the past, and they ex-
change periods, the agreement being that either will come to the
aid of the other if the going becomes difficult.

The next morning Pendrel pays a visit to the American am-
bassador, tells him what has happened, takes him to the house,
bids him goodbye, and steps into the doorway, thereupon enter-
ing the past. He finds a young woman within, Miss Molly Mid-
more, a distant relative, whom, it appears, he has just come from
America to marry. The remainder of the book as far as written
and apparently as far as planned deals with a conversation be-
tween these two and others, the conversation running through
the remainder of the day and evening. The other persons are
Molly's sister, Nan, who appears on the scene late, and with
whom Pendrel gradually falls in love, Molly's mother, Molly's
brother, and Nan's suitor.

The plot is something like this: as a result of the protracted
conversation, Pendrel and his hosts gradually become aware of
fine differences of social tone; differences which make Pendrel
feel an alien to the point of arousing his terror, and which on
the other hand cause the Midmores to feel a suspicion of Pen-
drel which becomes in the long run almost equally intense.
These differences are first a greater sophistication on the part of
the British than on the part of the American, and second a

3*3

greater brutality in regard to the essentially moral or humane
values on the part of the nineteenth century than on the part of
the twentieth. It is this latter difference which gradually becomes
the more obvious and which arouses Pendrel's terror.

Now the original young man of the nineteenth century had
really married Molly; but Pendrel gradually comes to find her
vaguely gross and repulsive, and he falls in love with Nan, who
is less characteristic of her period, and who falls in love with him.
Pendrel thus betrays his bargain; the other young man appears
to him from time to time to threaten him, and finally decides to
abandon him to the nineteenth century and his own devices,
from which he is ultimately rescued by the self-sacrifice of Nan.

In the course of the conversation, Pendrel finds himself from
the beginning provided with information about his situation,
and about the entire Midmore family, as the need arises, like a
man in a dream. At one point he even finds himself provided
with a miniature painting of Molly: he extracts it from his vest
pocket, in spite of the fact that a moment before he had had no
inkling of its 'existence.

The conversation is devoted in a large measure, so far as
subject matter is concerned, to establishing through this dream-
procedure, the antecedent relationships between the Pendrels
and the Midmores; so far as tone and effect arc concerned, it is
devoted to establishing the differences already mentioned. It is
often difficult if not impossible to grasp these differences, they
are so nearly imperceptible: the result of the difficulty is in a large
measure the feeling that James is nearly as hallucinated as Pen-
drel; it is a kind of pushing of James's passion for subtle distinc-
tions of manner to something resembling madness. James, like
the characters in The Awkward Age, becomes so watchful for
symptoms that he appears to become self-hypnotized; in this
again he resembles the later Hawthorne.

To illustrate the difficulty, let me quote from the description
of Mrs. Midmore: "However, she was herself an apparition of
such force that the question of his own luck missed application
and he but stared at her lost, and yet again lost, in that reflection
that yes, absolutely yes, no approach to such a quality of tone as

3*4

she dealt in had ever in his own country greeted his ear. Yes,
again and yet again, it spoke of ten thousand things that he could
guess at now in her presence, and that he had even dreamed of,
beforehand, through faint echoes and in other stray lights; things
he could see she didn't in the least think of at the moment either,
all possessed as she was with the allowance she had in her hos-
pitality already made for him. Every fact of her appearance con-
tributed somehow to this grand and generous air, the something-
or-other suggesting to him that he had never yet seen manner at
home at that pitch, any more than he had veritably heard utter-
ance. When or where, in any case, had his eye, alert as he might
feel it naturally was, been caught by such happy pomp as that of
the disposed dark veil or mantilla which, attached to her head,
framed in hoodlike looseness this seat of her high character and,
gathering about her shoulders, crossed itself as a pair of long ends
that depended in lacelike fashion almost to her feet? He had
apprehended after a few more seconds that here was 'costume'
beheld of him in the very fact and giving by its effect all the joy of
recognition— since he had hitherto had but to suppose and to con-
ceive it, though without being in the effort, as his own person
might testify, too awkwardly far out. Yes, take him for what she
would, she might see that he too was dressed— which tempered
his barbarism perhaps only too much and referred itself back
at all events, he might surely pretend, to a prime and after all not
uncommendable intuition of the matter. If he had always been,
as he would have allowed, overdressed for New York, where
this was a distinct injury to character and credit, business credit
at least, which he had none the less braced, so he had already
found he was no more than quite right for London, and for
Mansfield Square in especial; though at the same time he didn't
aspire, and wouldn't for the world, to correspond with such hints
as Mrs. Midmore threw off. She threw it off to a mere glance that
she represented by the aid of dress the absolute value and use of
presence as presence, apart from any other office— a pretension
unencountered in that experience of his own which he had yet up
to now tended to figure as lively. Absolutely again, as he could re-
cover, he had never understood presence without use to play a

recognized part; which would but come back indeed to the ques-
tion of what use— great ambiguous question-begging term!—
might on occasion consist of. He was not to go into that for some
time yet, but even on the spot it none the less shone at him for
the instant that he was apparently now to see ornament itself
frankly recognized as use; and not only that, but boldly con-
tented, unassailably satisfied, with a vagueness so portentous—
which it somehow gave a promise to his very eyes of the moment
that he should find convincingly asserted and extended. All this
conspired toward offering him in this wondrous lady a figure that
made ladies hitherto displayed to him, and among whom had
been several beauties, though doubtless none so great as splendid
Molly, lose at a stroke their lustre for memory, positively vitiated
as they thus seemed by the obscurity, not to say the flat humility,
of their employed and applied and their proportionately admired
state/'

One should note in connection with a passage like this one,
that concentration so intense and so exclusive on so trivial an
aspect of character amounts to madness, and that PendreFs in-
tense excitement is vastly disproportionate to any actual percep-
tion that one can disentangle, as it is likewise later in the story
when his attention begins to focus on what he conceives to be
the difference between the two periods, so that Pendrel, like
other characters mentioned, strongly resembles Mr. Wilson's ver-
sion of the governess in The Turn of the Screw., Further, in the
story as a whole, one perception is only indicated or suggested
before it suggests another and is consequently dropped; Pendrel's
(that is, James's) feelings and interpretations of events are essen-
tially similar in their emergence and progression to the informa-
tion on which they are based, which emerges and proceeds as in
a dream. This passage endeavors to make a marginal aspect of
experience ("tone") carry vastly more significance than is proper
to it, and it is, in addition, uncertain and incoherent in its import.
It is a striking fore-runner of the Experimental poetry of the
twentieth century, even of the extreme forms of such poetry, and
indicates more clearly than anything else could do the historical
continuity between the earlier American culture and the more

326

recent literature; for this phenomenon in James is distinctly, and
nothing more than, an extreme development of a difficulty in-
herent in all his work and in the society which gave rise to his
work, a difficulty of which he was in a considerable measure
aware, but of which he was insufficiently aware to correct it. The
obscurity of the moral problem, the development of the feeling
in excess of the motive, is a familiar phenomenon of the romantic
period, that is, of the period extending roughly from about 1750
to the present. The conscientious concentration upon this obscu-
rity—conscientious almost to hallucination, and almost to halluci-
nation because so seldom intellectual in spite of the conscientious-
ness—is the residue of the New England heritage, as I have
endeavored to show, even when that concentration is imputed to
an English character, such as Fleda Vetch.

I should like to consider briefly the margin of similar difficulty
inhering in some of the more successful novels.

Roderick Hudson is a portrait of a certain type of romantic
genius in disintegration. Hudson, the genius, is taken to Rome
by a wealthy compatriot, Mallett, and there rapidly matures as
an artist, but in the process of so doing loses control of himself
morally, sinks into a condition of mental and moral lethargy, and
eventually dies in a storm in the Alps, perhaps by suicide, prob-
ably by accident, after a brief but brilliant career in which he has
managed to outrage most of the human decencies and apparently
with very small consciousness of what he is doing. James in his
preface to this work remarks: "My mistake on Roderick's behalf
—and not in the least of conception, but of composition and expres-
sion—is that, at the rate at which he falls to pieces, he seems to
place himself beyond our understanding and our sympathy.
These are not our rates, we say; we ourselves certainly, under
like pressure,— for what is it, after all?— would make more of a
fight. We conceive going to pieces— nothing is easier, since we
see people do it, one way or another, all round us; but this young
man must either have had less of the principle of development to
have had so much of the principle of collapse, or less of the prin-
ciple of collapse to have had so much of the principle of develop-
ment. 'On the basis of so great a weakness/ one hears the reader

3*7

say, 'where was the idea of your interest? On the basis of so great
an interest, where is the provision for so much weakness?' One
feels indeed, in the light of this challenge, on how much too
scantily projected and suggested a field poor Roderick and his
large capacity for ruin are made to turn round. It has all begun too
soon, as I say, and too simply, and the determinant function at-
tributed to Christina Light, the character of well-nigh sole agent
of his catastrophe that this young woman has forced upon her,
fails to commend itself to our sense of truth and proportion/'

We have here the objection of the experienced novelist in his
old age to a work of his youth; and he seems to miss the point
as a result of concentrating so acutely upon the problems of the
construction of novels in general as to forget the subject of the
novel in hand. The subject in hand is a particular type of irra-
tional genius fairly common since the third quarter of the eight-
eenth century; and anyone who has ever played in a modest way
the role of a Mallett or even of a more remote observer of a crea-
ture like Hudson, or anyone who has ever seriously considered
the life and letters, let us say, of Shelley, can scarcely fail to be
struck by the verisimilitude. From the point of view of the
Jamesian novelist, the work is not properly a novel, and for the
reasons which James assigns— it contains too little of the element
of struggle to be dramatic— but as a full-length and objective por-
trait of an uncommon but still recognizable type, the book is in
its fashion superb.

It is the subject, then, and not the method, which justifies the
younger James against the older; but if the same objections can
be raised against the treatment of individuals presumably more
normal, the situation becomes more serious.

In The American, an early novel to which I have repeatedly
referred in the earlier sections of this essay, Christopher New-
man, the American who gives the book its title, becomes engaged
to marry Mme. de Cintre, a beautiful and aristocratic young
French widow, of the family Bellegarde; then her mother and
her older brother break off the engagement, on the grounds that,
on second thought, an alliance with so rank a barbarian is a more
painful experience than they can endure. Newman has disliked

3*8

these two from the outset, and has suspected them of an evil
past; the suspicion hovers over the entire book. Mme. de Cintr6,
in taking leave of Newman, in her mother's presence, says she
is doing it because she is afraid of her mother. The younger
brother, who has become Newman's friend, and who feels the
family to have been disgraced by this perfidy on the part of his
brother and mother, tells Newman on his deathbed that he is
sure that his mother and brother between them killed his father
and that a certain family servant knows the details. From this
servant, Newman obtains a note written by the elder marquis
just before his death and given her as he was dying, which says
that his wife has killed him, but with no explanation. The serv-
ant hazards the guess that when the marquise was with the mar-
quis alone, she may have poured his medicine on the ground
when he called for it, in an attack of pain, and at the same time
have given him a look so full of hatred that he wished to die. At
any rate, after a long illness, and shortly after he had begun to
recover, he lapsed into a coma after his wife had spent some
hours alone with him, and recovered only long enough to write
this note and give it to the servant.

The details of the evil in the Bellegardes are very uncertain;
yet the effect in the form of their social presence, their emotional
effect upon Newman, is very definite. Also, the fear felt by the
heroine of her mother, the nature of the power wielded by the
mother over her, is largely obscure, though it may in part be
explained by social usage and by consequently ingrained habit,
beginning in childhood.

James is fairly severe on this work in his preface. He writes:
"The only general attribute of projected romance that I can see,
the only one that fits all its cases, is the fact of the kind of experi-
ence with which it deals—experience liberated, so to speak; ex-
perience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from
the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and, if we
wish so to put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a me-
dium which relieves it, in a particular interest, of the incon-
venience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our
vulgar communities. The greatest intensity may so be arrived at

3*9

evidently— when the sacrifice of community, of the 'related' sides
of situations, has not been too rash. It must to this end not
flagrantly betray itself; we must even be kept if possible, for our
illusion, from suspecting any sacrifice at all. The balloon of ex-
perience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that
necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the
more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the
rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is
cut we are at large and unrelated: we only swing apart from the
globe— though remaining as exhilarated, naturally, as we like,
especially when all goes well. The art of the romancer is, 'for the
fun of it/ insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detect-
ing him. What I have recognized then in 'The American/ much
to my surprise and after long years, is that the experience here
represented is the disconnected and uncontrolled experience-
uncontrolled by our general sense of 'the way things happen'—
which romance alone more or less successfully palms off on us."

James in discussing the defects of this plot in the preface states
that the Bellegardes, had they been real French people of their
class and type, would not have treated Newman as in the novel;
that they would have got hold of him and kept him as quietly as
possible and have fed their self-esteem and sense of security on
the profit. This, of course, is conjecture, and in actual life it is
at least conceivable that they might have acted either way. But
he gets closer to the heart of the difficulty in discussing Mme. de
Cintre, her fear of her mother, and the obscure influence wielded
over her by her mother. He says: "It is as difficult, I said above,
to trace the dividing line between the real and the romantic as
to plant a mile-stone between north and south; but I am not sure
an infallible sign of the latter is not this rank vegetation of the
'power* of bad people that good get into, or vice-versa. It is so
rarely, alas, into our power that anyone gets!"

Now it so happens that this formula is applicable, not only to
The American, but to a good deal of James: this particular rank
vegetation is the specific form that the Jamesian moral obscurity
frequently takes. Christina Light exercises some such power over
Roderick Hudson, but, as I have already pointed out, the power,

330

like the other aspects of Hudson's behavior, becomes compre-
hensible on the understanding that Hudson is essentially an in-
comprehensible type; in The Turn of the Screw, the ghosts ex-
ercise such a power over the children, but they again are immune
to ordinary standards of criticism, for either they are ghosts, and
so supernatural, or else they are the products of an insane mind
and so legitimately romantic. The power of Muniment and of
the Princess Casamassima (formerly Christina Light) over Hya-
cinth Robinson verges on this phenomenon, but perhaps less
clearly. The power of Osmund over his wife and his daughter
in The Portrait of a Lady, is a particularly clear example; and
to this I shall return in a moment.

James writes further in the preface to The American: "Noth-
ing here is in truth 'offered'— everything is evaded, and the effect
of this, I recognize, is of the oddest. His relation to Mme. de
Cintre takes a great stride, but the author appears to view that
but as a signal for letting it severely alone." And again, of Mme.
de Cintre: "With this lady, altogether, I recognize, a light plank,
too light a plank, is laid for the reader over a dark 'psychologi-
cal' abyss. The delicate clue to her conduct is never definitely
placed in his hand: I must have liked to think verily it was deli-
cate and to flatter myself that it was to be felt with the finger-tips
rather than heavily tugged at." Much of the obscurity of this plot,
then, became evident to James, and the obscurity as described in
his own terms is of much the same sort as that which he found
in Roderick Hudson; but we cannot find in the subject of The
American the justification for the obscurity which we can find
in the subject of the other book. There is a marked tendency in
this book on the part of James and of his characters alike to read
into situations more than can be justified by the facts as given,
to build up intense states of feeling, on the basis of such reading,
and to judge or act as a result of that feeling. This is what we
found Fleda Vetch doing in The Spoils of Poynton, and above
all it is what we found the governess doing in The Turn of the
Screw, so intensely, in fact, that the story may well be taken to
serve, if we accept the psychopathic interpretation, as a very
acute and devastating self-parody.

33 i

In The Portrait of a Lady the chief difficulty resides in the
feelings inspired by Osmund in the latter part of the book, and
in Isabel's final decision; the margin of obscurity here is slight,
and to the average American admirer of James will no doubt
appear negligible, but the margin is genuine notwithstanding
and is worth examining if we wish to get a broad view of the
man. Osmund is a kind of neurotic aesthete, self-centered, un-
scrupulous within the limits of safety, and thoroughly unpleas-
ant, but the species of terror which Isabel comes to feel in regard
to him is absolutely unexplained by any of his actions or by any
characteristic described. He betrayed Isabel in regard to his mar-
riage with her, but this betrayal is scarcely a motive for the par-
ticular feeling which Isabel comes to experience. Furthermore,
the same feeling is experienced by the daughter, Pansy, who was
presumably unaware of the deception: Pansy is confined in a
convent to break off her attachment to her young and unsuitable
admirer; the convent is the one in which she went to school
throughout childhood and is wholly familiar, and the nuns are
devoted anJ'kind; but Pansy after a brief period there can en-
dure no more and surrenders abjectly and in fear. The influence
of Osmund here is of the same obscure type as the influence of
the Bellegardes. And at the end, though Isabel returns to her
husband because of an intense moral sense, generically of the
same type as that of Fleda Vetch, James seems to fear the in-
adequacy of this sense as a sole motive, and bolsters it up by
her desire and promise to stand by Pansy in the trials ahead of
her. The power and influence thus obscurely wielded by Osmund
provide the dramatic crisis of the book.

In The Princess Casamassima a similar power is exerted over
Hyacinth Robinson by Paul Muniment and by the Princess; in
fact, the entire effect of Muniment's character is unexplained,
and that of the Princess is but partly explained. Muniment is a
member of a secret revolutionary and terroristic group, and his
entire value in the novel derives from this fact; he is the moral
agent of a hidden and malign power; the impressiveness of his
character is the perceptible token of this fact; his influence over
Hyacinth is the power in action. But on the actual stage of the

33*

novel he does little or nothing; of the views, purposes, and ac-
tivities of his group we know next to nothing and we suspect
that James knew less; we see Muniment enter a dark doorway
occasionally, accompanied by the Princess, a doorway behind
which we suspect that a meeting is in progress; we hear the last,
ominous, but uninformative conversational exchange between the
two immediately prior to their separating after a discussion of
some kind; and for the rest we observe Muniment at tea-parties,
conversing very little but tremendously impressing all present.
In The Ivory Tower the effect of the American financial career is
portrayed in much the same manner, but the real action produc-
ing the effect, the essential evil, is not described, for of that,
James, as he admitted, knew nothing. The remarkable thing
about both of these plots is the degree of realism that James man-
ages to extract from them, when they are, essentially, so inane.

Joseph Warren Beach remarks of The Princess Casamassima:*
"As for the revolutionary movement, the very vagueness of its
presentation was a part of James's scheme. 'My scheme,' he says,
'called for the suggested nearness (to all our apparently ordered
life) of some sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain,
its power and its hate; a presentation not of sharp particulars, but
of loose appearances, vague motions and sounds and symptoms,
just perceptible presences and general looming possibilities.' "
The trouble appears to the present writer to be that as a motivat-
ing force for a two- volume novel, especially a novel which pur-
ports to spread so vast a canvas for the representation of various
levels of society, these "vague motions, sounds, and symptoms"
have little more force or dignity than a small boy under a sheet
on Hallowe'en; they repeatedly approach the ludicrous: the adult
in broad daylight, that is the reader of a Jamesian novel, is un-
likely to experience terror without admitting good reason. Beach
a little later remarks of the Princess herself:8 "But she is also, for
Hyacinth and for us, the mystery of a character not thoroughly
understood . . . what we are never sure of is how far she is hu-
man." Beach prefers her representation in this novel to her rep-

j. *

5J. W. Beach, op. cit., page 213.
8 Ibid., page 215.

333

reservation in Roderick Hudson, and regards this book as one of
the greater ones. But in Roderick Hudson we are fairly certain as
to how far she is human and how far not, and the exact degree
is rendered not only clearly but compactly, and in terms of defi-
nite action; she appears there in a clear light, a figure of inimi-
table beauty and perversity. The Princess Casamassima as a novel
suffers in its actual form from the obscure background of all save
three of its characters— Anastasius Vetch, Miss Pynsent, and in a
measure Hyacinth— and so many and such long scenes are de-
voted to the representation of obscure characters that the novel
appears to have little form; we are most of the time in a kind of
stagnant water.

If we proceed from these latter works to the latest, and consider
the book which for James was his most satisfactory, The Am-
bassadors, we have at least three sources of difficulty, of possible
dissatisfaction. In the first place, it is only by stretching a point
that we can bring ourselves to consider Chad Newsome at best a
bone worth quite so much contention, worth the expenditure ol
quite so much moral heroism as Strether expends upon him. We
can understand Chad's hesitation to return to the American busi-
ness life of his period, but his alternative— that of a young man
about Paris, however cultivated,— is scarcely the alternative of a
Henry Adams. The central issue does not quite support the dra-
matics, as does, on the other hand, the central issue of each of the
other late masterpieces, The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the
Dove. Furthermore, our final attitude toward Chad is unresolved,
and thus resembles our final attitude toward Owen Gereth in The
Spoils of Poynton; this may not be untrue to life, but it is untrue
to art, for a work of art is an evaluation, a judgment, of an experi-
ence, and only in so far as it is that is it anything; and James in
this one respect does not even judge the state of uncertainty, but
as in The Spoils of Poynton, he merely leaves us uncertain.
Shakespeare left us in no uncertainty about Coriolanus; Melville
in none about Ahab or Benito Cereno; nor did either author lack
subtlety. And finally, Strether's ultimate scruple— to give up
Maria Gostrey, so that he may not seem in Woollett to have got
anything for himself from a situation in which he will seem to his

334

friends in Woollett to have betrayed his trust, and in spite of the
fact that Miss Gostrey could scarcely have been regarded as in
any sense a bribe— this scruple, I say, impresses me very strongly
as a sacrifice of morality to appearances: there might, conceivably,
have been more Christian humility in considering the feelings of
Maria Gostrey and in letting his reputation in Woollett go by the
board. The moral choice, here, appears to be of the same strained
and unjustifiable type as that of Fleda Vetch, or as that of Isabel
Archer.

Joseph Warren Beach7 in his chapter on the ethics of James
asserts that no one save an American, or conceivably an English-
man, will ever understand James and admire him as he deserves,
because the Jamesian morality will be incomprehensible; and he
adds that the morality is essentially the morality of the New Eng-
land of Emerson and Thoreau. Beach does not enlarge upon these
ideas; they stand in his text very much as impressions; but they
would seem to be fairly sound. I have endeavored to define the
Jamesian morality as closely as possible and to show its background
in history. It does not seem to me possible that an American,
even a provincial American like myself, can be wholly sym-
pathetic with James if he examines him closely and in his histor-
ical context. Mr. Beach, though he does not examine that context,
though he appears to be almost as helplessly in it and of it as
James himself— I should add, perhaps, that my admiration for
Mr. Beach, like my admiration for James, is very great— is aware,
though imperfectly, of the difficulty, or at least perceives a good
many individual representations of the difficulty. And James is
almost more perceptive in this respect than is Mr. Beach, in spite
of his having been the primary sinner. I have already cited a num-
ber of examples of his self-criticism; I might cite a passage from
a novel, The Bostonians, which satirizes the very social context
from which he arose, and which would seem to have been largely
responsible for his difficulty. James describes Mrs. Tarrant, the
wife of the faith-healer and charlatan-at-large, in terms that might
also serve as an exaggerated description of James himself at his
worst: "When she talked and wished to insist, and she was al-

Ibid., page 131.

335

ways insisting, she puckered and distorted her face, with an effort
to express the inexpressible, which turned out, after all, to be
nothing." Of this woman's husband, he wrote: "Tarrant was a
moralist without a moral sense." But in this Tarrant did not
resemble James, but was rather the representative of another as-
pect of New England, the aspect best represented in literature,
perhaps, by Cooper's Jason Newcome, and best promoted in life
by Benjamin Franklin, though Franklin personally had little
enough in common or at the very worst a great deal that was
not in common with Tarrant and Newcome. James, however,
had too much moral sense, but was insufficiently a moralist.

v

The foregoing pages might lead the careless reader to assume
that my opinion of James is low; the fact of the matter is, that
if I were permitted a definition of the novel which should exclude
among other works Moby Dick, Mardi, The Encantadas, and the
autobiographical works of Melville— and such a definition would
be neither difficult nor illegitimate— I should be inclined to con-
sider James as the greatest novelist in English, as he is certainly
one of the five or six greatest writers of any variety to be produced
in North America, though the estimate would proceed from a
view of the history and form of the novel that would in all likeli-
hood be pleasing to few devotees of that art.

The fact of the matter is, that in reading most of the English
and American novelists preceding James who are commonly
conceded to be great, our estimate of the writers' genius is formed
very largely on the quality of the incidentals of the works under
consideration, and not on the quality of what in a drama or an
epic would be the essentials. Jane Austen, who is inescapably one
of the best, hangs her remarkably brilliant comment and char-
acterization on frames of action so conventional as to be all but
trivial; the same is true of Trollope; it is more obviously true of
Scott. It is less true of such a writer as Dickens, but a plot by
Dickens, and usually half of the attendant characters, will ordi-
narily be so corrupted by insufferable sentimentalism, that one

336

turns hither and yonder infallibly to reap what profit one may
from the details. The plotting of Meredith and of George Eliot
is far more serious, but both writers fall very much below James
in characterization and in the quality of their prose. The prose of
James is sometimes obscure, and as a result of the obscurity it
may sometimes be found diffuse, but it is always sensitive and
honest; the prose of George Eliot is laborious, and the prose of
Meredith is worse— it is laboriously clever.

If we come to James as we come to Dickens or to Trollope,
with the initial assumption that the plot can be taken or left
according to the mood of the reader, the wealth of incidental
felicities which we are likely to find will scarcely be equalled by
any other novelist in English. Many writers have commented
upon the unforgettable vividness of James's characterization; I
personally have a far sharper recollection of the characteristics
and attitudes, even of the external appearance, of many char-
acters from James, and I have such a recollection of more char-
acters, than I have from all the rest of English fiction, and cer-
tainly far more than I have from my own life. Consider, for a
moment, an incomplete enumeration such as the following: Rod-
erick Hudson, Rowland Mallett, Christina Light, and Mary Gar-
land, from Roderick Hudson, not to mention minor characters so
charming as Sam Singleton; Isabel Archer, Ralph Touchett,
Mme. Merle, Gilbert Osmund, Caspar Goodwood, Henrietta
Stackpole, and Lord Warburton, of The Portrait of a Lady, Hya-
cinth Robinson, Miss Pynsent, and Anastasius Vetch (one of the
most moving of all the minor figures) of The Princess Casamas-
sima; from The Tragic Muse, Sherringham, Dormer, Lady Julia,
Dormer's mother, Mr. Carteret, and Gabriel Nash, a figure more
perverse and astonishing than any other save Christina Light or
possibly her poodle; Nanda, Mitchy, and Mr. Longdon of The
Awkward Age; Strether, Maria Gostrey, the Newsomes and
Pococks, Waymarsh, Mme. de Vionnet, of The Ambassadors;
Kate Croy, Merton Densher, and Milly Theale, of The Wings of
the Dove; Maggie Verver, her father, the Prince, and Charlotte
Stant, of The Golden Bowl; Fleda Vetch and Mrs. Gereth, of
The Spoils of Poynton; the legendary but beautiful figures, all

337

but static in their remote perfection, of The Europeans; these are
only a few of the creatures of James whom, if one once has met
them, one can never forget. They are not great caricatures, like
Sir Pitt Crawley, whom one remembers carrying Becky Sharp's
trunk into the house, or like the old laird of Kidnapped, whose
nightcapped head one remembers projecting from the window,
but they are created with a restraint such that there is no exagger-
ation, yet with an awareness so rich that every essential detail is
realized; after the lapse of years they are remembered not like
portraits from a book but like persons one has known, yet they
are remembered more clearly, for the observation of James is finer
than our own would have been.

Further, the margin of imperfection in many of the works is
not of the utmost seriousness aesthetically. Many of the minor
works— The Europeans is nearly the best example— are perfect
within their limits; the margin of difficulty in such major efforts
as The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors is not great in
proportion to the wealth offered us; The Wings of the Dove and
The Golderi'Bowl, though both books display undue clairvoy-
ance on the part of certain characters, are both in their central
plotting, it seems to me, perfectly sound.

Finally, his very virtues, in the semi-successful works, and in
the successful as well, are closely related to his defects. His de-
fects arise from the effort on the part of the novelist and of his
characters to understand ethical problems in a pure state, and to
understand them absolutely, to examine the marginal, the semi-
obscure, the fine and definitive boundary of experience; the
purely moral— that is, the moral divorced from all problems of
manners and of compulsion, as it appears in the case of Fleda
Vetch— can probably be defined but very rarely, and more or less
as the result of good fortune in regard to the given facts of the
situation, with the precision which James appears to seek, so that
the effort in all save a few occasional and perfect situations must
necessarily lead to more or less supersubtlety, and if the super-
subtlety is pushed far enough, as it sometimes is, to an obsurant-
ism amounting in effect to hallucination. On the other hand,
the effort unquestionably results in a degree of very genuine sub-

338

tlety, not only of central moral perception, but of incidental per-
ception of character, that no other novelist has equalled. An ad-
ditional reason for the memorableness of the Jamesian characters
is the seriousness with which they take themselves and each
other: we feel that we are somehow on essential ground with
them, even if the essentiality of the ground results in its shifting
like quicksand; we may disapprove of Fleda Vetch as a person
for her errors and as a creation for the errors of James; but the in-
tegrity with which the errors are made, their fidelity to the his-
torical context of which they are an essential part, and in spite of
the fact that a great artist properly considered ought to have a
better understanding than James displayed of the defects and
dangers of his own historical context, this integrity and this fidel-
ity in themselves are unforgettable; we do not have great tragedy,
but we at least share a real experience, and the reality is of a
quality that we shall find but rarely if at all in other novelists.
And finally, we have only the loosest conception of the successful
works and elements of James, if we do not fully understand his
kind and degree of failure, for the failure represents the particu-
lar problem with which he was struggling to deal— one could al-
most regard it as his subject-matter.

As Mr. Beach points out, James's technical development is a de-
velopment steadily in the direction of identifying the author's
point of view with that of some particular character, toward the
elimination of the function of the omniscient author. One might
imagine that the obscurity in many of the novels resulted from
the elimination of the author as commentator, from his resigning
himself to the point of view of his character, except for two rea-
sons: first, the character chosen to provide the point of view is
usually very close to James himself in the quality of his intelli-
gence, and second, the obscurity is as obvious in the early novels,
in which the omniscient author is plainly discernible, as it is in
the later, from which he has evaporated. This technical aim,
however, seems to me unquestionably to result in a certain vitia-
tion of the prose as prose: explicit and compact exposition or de-
scription of any kind is eliminated from the later novels, the mat-
ter that would ordinarily go into such prose being broken up and

339

diffused in minutely discernible fragments through conversa-
tions and the miscellaneous perceptions of daily life; the attempt
is made to introduce the material that would ordinarily be con-
veyed in such prose in a manner closely resembling the manner
in which it entered the experience, and perhaps hovered there,
of the character in question, so that we tend strongly in the later
novels, so far as the prose itself is concerned, toward the fallacy
of expressive form. The prose of The Age of Innocence or of The
Valley of Decision is certainly superior to the prose of James; the
prose of Melville in such a passage as that describing Dr. Cuticle
and his operation, in White Jacket, in compactness, richness of
implication, clarity of detail, and rhetorical variety and mastery,
surpasses James incomparably. Mr. Beach8 cites the following
passage from Roderick Hudson as an example of the sort of tra-
ditional prose which James mercifully outgrew in the later
novels: "Rowland's second guest was also an artist, but of a very
different type. His friends called him Sam Singleton; he was an
American, and he had been in Rome a couple of years. He
painted small 'landscapes, chiefly in water-color; Rowland had
seen one of them in a shop window, had liked it extremely and,
ascertaining his address, had gone to see him and found him es-
tablished in a very humble studio near the Piazza Barberini,
where apparently fame and fortune had not yet come his way.
Rowland, treating him as a discovery, had bought several of his
pictures; Singleton made few speeches, but was intensely grate-
ful. Rowland heard afterwards that when he first came to Rome
he painted worthless daubs and gave no promise of talent. Im-
provement had come, however, hand in hand with patient in-
dustry, and his talent, though of a slender and delicate order, was
now incontestable. It was as yet but scantly recognized and he
had hard work to hold out. Rowland hung his little water-
colors on the library wall, and found that as he lived with
them he grew very fond of them. Singleton, short and spare,
was made as if for sitting on very small camp-stools and eating
the tiniest luncheons. He had a transparent brown regard, a
perpetual smile, an extraordinary expression of modesty and pa-

8 Ibid., page 192.
340

tience. He listened much more willingly than he talked, with a
little fixed grateful grin; he blushed when he spoke, and always
offered his ideas as if he were handing you useful objects of your
own that you had unconsciously dropped; so that his credit could
be at most for honesty. He was so perfect an example of the little
noiseless devoted worker whom chance, in the person of a mon-
eyed patron, has never taken by the hand, that Rowland would
have liked to befriend him by stealth/*

This is not great prose, but it is fine prose and fine perception.
Neither as prose nor as characterization will it suffer by compari-
son with the portrait of Mrs. Midmore cited earlier in these
pages. One could find better sketches of the same type in the
early novels, and even as late as the Portrait; this type of prose
can be developed very far indeed, as one can readily discover by
reading Melville. It does not sacrifice reality, and it can be made
to possess both sinew and form. The mere fact that this type of
sketch is a traditional device is irrelevant to its virtues; James's
later method is equally a device, and more obtrusively so, since
we are forced to concentrate upon it, and as a device it is in our
own day no longer new.

It would be easy to say that the virtues which I have described
are inseparable from the methods of style which I deplore, but I
doubt it; the virtues are already strongly marked in the early
works, in which the later technique is not employed, so that one
has some justification for feeling that a certain maturity of out-
look and richness of observation increased, as a result of age and
experience, concomitantly with a defective procedure in style,
the result of an error in theory. It is only a step, in the matter of
style, from The Golden Bowl to Dorothy Richardson and Proust,
from them to the iridescent trifling of Mrs. Woolf, and from her
to the latest Joyce; in fact James travelled the greater part of this
distance when he wrote The Sense of the Past. I do not deny the
genius of these writers— if I did not feel it, I should not consider
it profitable to cite them— but they are all, even Proust by at least
a perceptible margin, inferior to James, and they represent a pro-
gressive decay, an increase in diffusion, a decrease in detailed
effectiveness, in the matter of style. Mr. Beach, on the other hand,

341

believes that James's technical development was toward perfec-
tion; but if the prose must be weakenec^ in order to perfect the
novel, then something is radically wrong with the novel as a
form of art.

It is likely that one can find an isolated novel here and there
to surpass any by James; one might argue with considerable rea-
son that The Age of Innocence, partly because it corrects, as I
have shown, a serious defect in the Jamesian conception of the
novel, partly because of its finer prose, is the finest single flower
of the Jamesian art; one which James fertilized but would have
been unable to bring to maturity. The Valley of Decision, a
novel of a very different cast, might also be defended as superior
to any single work by James, as might also Billy Budd and Ben-
ito Cereno, which unlike most of the work of Melville are true
novels. But neither Mrs. Wharton nor Melville can equal James
in the vast crowd of unforgettable human beings whom he
created; Melville, moreover, except in Billy Budd, Benito Cer-
eno, and Israel Potter, is scarcely a novelist, and Mrs. Wharton,
except in the two novels mentioned, in The Custom of the Coun-
try, and in a small group of novelettes, is mediocre when she is
not worse.

It is James himself, as I have abundantly indicated, who holds
our attention so constantly on his defects of conception. As I have
shown, he was so obsessed with the problem of moral judgment
in its relation to character, that he not only constructed his plots
so that they turned almost wholly on problems of ethical choice,
but he sought to isolate the ethical problem as far as possible
from all determining or qualifying elements, an effort which in
any period would have led to difficulty, and which in his period
would have been sufficient to dissolve in complete obscurity any
talent save one of the greatest. As a result of this effort at isola-
tion, he accomplished two secondary ends which have no bearing
upon the value of his art as such: he focussed attention forever
upon the problems of serious plotting, and in this respect he
probably brought about the greatest single change in the practice
of the novel ever effected by one man; and in addition he fixed
imperishably the finest quality of American life of his period. In

connection with this second accomplishment, it should be added
that he himself appears to have had but an imperfect understand-
ing of that quality, so that he not only fixed the defects as well
as the virtues of the quality, but did so without the comprehen-
sion of the defects, or with a very imperfect comprehension, did
so partly by representing them, but also, and unfortunately al-
most more clearly by embodying them. Regarded only for the
kind and degree of its failure, but regarded patiently and intelli-
gently, his art is a social phenomenon equalled in its interest by
few others in the history of our nation, and equalled, I should
imagine, by no other in the history of our literature; it is a phe-
nomenon as representative intensively and extensively as the
career, let us say, of John D. Rockefeller, in another realm of ac-
tion. To understand him, we must understand the history of
which he is the culmination; and when we understand him, we
have the key to most of the literature and to much else that has
followed and is likely to follow.

343

A Brief Selection of the Poems of
JONES VERY

THE COMING OF THE LORD

Come suddenly, O Lord, or slowly come:
1 wait thy will; thy servant ready is:
Thou hast prepared thy follower a home,—
The heaven in which Thou dwellest, too, is his.

Come in the morn, at noon, or midnight deep;
Come, for thy servant still doth watch and pray:
E'en when the world around is sunk in sleep.
I wake and long to see thy glorious day.

I would'not fix the time, the day, nor hour,
When Thou with all thine angels shalt appear;
When in thy kingdom Thou shalt come with power, -
E'en now, perhaps, the promised day is near!

For though in slumber deep the world may lie,
And een thy Church forget thy great command;
Still, year by year, thy coming draweth nigh,
And in its power thy kingdom is at hand.

Not in some future world alone 'twill he,
Beyond the grave, beyond the bounds of time;
But on the earth thy glory we shall see,
And share thy triumph, peaceful, pure, sublime.

Lord, help me that 1 faint not, weary grow,
Nor at thy coming slumber, too, and sleep;
For Thou hast promised, and full well I know
Thou wilt to us thy word of promise keep.

344

THE SON

Father, I -wait thy word. The sun doth stand

Beneath the mingling line of night and day,

A listening servant, waiting thy command

To roll rejoicing on its silent way;

The tongue of time abides the appointed hour,

Till on our ears its solemn warnings fall;

The heavy cloud withholds the pelting shower,

Then every drop speeds onward at thy call;

The bird reposes on the yielding hough,

With breast unswollen by the tide of song;

So does my spirit wait thy presence now

To pour thy praise in quickening life along,

Chiding with voice divine man's lengthened sleep.

While round the Unuttered Word and Love their vigils keep.

THE NEW BIRTH

'Tis a new life;— thoughts move not as they did,
With slow uncertain steps across my mind;
In thronging haste fast pressing on they bid
The portals open to the viewless wind,
That comes not save when in the dust is laid
The crown of pride that guilds each mortal brow,
And from before mans vision melting fade
The heavens and earth; their walls are falling now.
Fast crowding on, each thought asks utterance strong;
Storm-lifted waves swift rushing to the shore,
On from the sea they send their shouts along,
Back through the cave-worn rocks their thunders roar;
And I, a Child of God by Christ made free,
Start from death's slumbers to eternity.

345

THE NEW WORLD

The night that has no star lit up by God,

The day that round men shines who still are blind,

The earth their grave-turned feet for ages trod,

And sea swept over by His mighty wind?—

All these have passed, away; the melting dream

That flitted o'er the sleepers half-shut eye,

When touched by mornings golden-darting beam;

And he beholds around the earth and sky

What ever real stands; the rolling spheres,

And heaving billows of the boundless main,

That show, though time is past, no trace of years,

And earth restored he sees as his again,

The earth that fades not, and the heavens that stand,

Their strong foundations laid by God's right hand!

THE EARTH

I would lie low— the ground on which men tread-
Swept by thy Spirit like the wind of heaven;
An earth, where gushing springs and corn for bread
By me at every season should be given;
Yet not the water or the bread that now
Supplies their tables with its daily food,
But they should gather fruit from every bough,
Such as Thou givest me, and call it good;
And water from the stream of life should flow,
By every dwelling that thy love has built,
Whose taste the ransomed of thy Son shall know,
Whose robes are washed from every stain of guilt;
And men would own it was thy hand that blest,
And from my bosom find a surer rest.

346

THE PRESENCE

I sit within my room, and joy to find
That Thou, who always lov'st, art with me here;
That 1 am never left by Thee behind,
But by Thyself Thou keep'st me ever near.
The fire burns brighter when with Thee I look,
And seems a kinder servant sent to me;
With gladder heart I read thy holy book,
Because Thou art the eyes by which I see;
This aged chair, that table, watch, and door
Around in ready service ever wait;
Nor can 1 ask of Thee a menial more
To fill the measure of my large estate,
For Thou thyself, with all a Fathers care
Where'er I turn, art ever with me there.

THE SONG

When I would sing of crooked streams and fields,

On, on from me they stretch too far and wide,

And at their look my song all powerless yields.

And down the river bears me with its tide.

Amid the fields I am a child again,

The spots that then 1 loved 1 love the more,

My fingers drop the strangely scrawling pen,

And I remember nought but Natures lore.

1 plunge me in the rivers cooling wave,

Or on the embroidered bank admiring lean,

Now some endangered insect life to save,

Now watch the pictured flowers and grasses green;

Forever playing where a boy I played,

By hill and grove, by field and stream delayed.

347

To THE PURE ALL THINGS ARE PURE

The flowers 1 pass have eyes that look at me,
The birds have ears that hear my spirit's voice,
And I am glad the leaping brook to see,
Because it does at my light step rejoice.
Come, brothers, all who tread the grassy hill,
Or wander thoughtless o'er the blooming fields,
Come learn the sweet obedience of the will;
Thence every sight and sound new pleasure yields.
Nature shall seem another house of thine,
When He who formed thee, bids it live and play,
And in thy rambles e'en the creeping vine
Shall keep with thee a jocund holiday,
And every plant, and bird, and insect be
Thine own companions born for harmony.

THE FAIR MORNING
(as in the edition of 1886)

The clear bright morning, with its scented air
And gaily waving flowers, is here again;
Man's heart is lifted with the voice of prayer,
And peace descends, as falls the gentle rain;
The tuneful birds, that all the night have slept,
Take up at dawn the evening's dying lay,
When sleep upon their eyelids gently crept
And stole with gentle craft their song away.
High overhead the forest's swaying boughs
Sprinkle with drops the traveller on his way;
He hears far off the tinkling bells of cows
Driven to pasture at the break of day;
With vigorous step he passes swift along,
Making the woods reecho with his song.

348

THE CALL

Why art thou not awake, my son?
The morning breaks 1 formed for thee;
And I thus early lay thee stand,
Thy new-awakening life to see.

Why are thou not awake, my son?
The birds upon the bough rejoice;
And I thus early by thee stand,
To hear with theirs thy tuneful voice.

Why sleep st thou still? The laborers all
Are in my vineyard: hear them toil,—
As for the poor, with harvest song
They treasure up the wine and oil.

1 come to wake thee; haste, arise,
Or thou no share with Me can find;
Thy sandals seize, gird on thy clothes,
Or I must leave thee far behind.

THE PRAYER

Wilt Thou not visit me?
The plant beside me feels thy gentle deiv,

And every blade of grass 1 see
From thy deep earth its quickening moisture drew.

Wilt Thou not visit me?
Thy morning calls on me with cheering tone;

And every hill and tree
Lend but one voice,— the voice of Thee alone.

Come, for I need thy love,
More than the flower the dew or grass the rain;

349

Come gently as thy holy dove;
And let me in thy sight rejoice to live again.

not hide from them
When thy storms come, though fierce may be their wrath,

But bow with leafy stem,
And strengthened follow on thy chosen path.

Yes, Thou wilt visit me:
Nor plant nor tree thine eye delimits so well,

As, when from sin set free,
My spirit loves with thine in peace to dwell.

THE COTTAGE

The house my earthly parent left

My heavenly parent still throws down,

For 'tis of air and sun bereft,

Nor stars its roof with beauty crown.

He gave it me, yet gave it not
As one whose gifts are wise and good;
'Twas lout a poor and clay-built cot,
And for a time the storms withstood.

But lengthening years and frequent rain
O'ercame its strength: it tottered, fell,
And left me homeless here again,—
And where to go 1 could not tell.

But soon the light and open air
Received me as a wandering child,
And I soon thought their house more fair,
And all my grief their love beguiled.

Mine was the grove, the pleasant field
Where dwelt the flowers 1 daily trod;

350

And there beside them, too, 1 kneeled
And called their friend, my Father, God.

AUTUMN FLOWERS

Still blooming on, when Summer flowers all fade,
The golden-rods and asters fill the glade;
The tokens they of an Exhaustless Love
That ever to the end doth constant prove.

To one fair tribe another still succeeds,
As still the heart new forms of beauty needs;
Till these bright children of the waning year,
Its latest born, have come our souls to cheer.

They glance upon us from their fringed eyes,
And to their look our own in love replies;
Within our hearts we find for them a place,
As for the flowers which early spring-time grace.

Despond not, traveler! On lifes lengthened way,
When all thy early friends have passed away;
Say not, "No more the beautiful doth live,
And to the earth a bloom and fragrance give."

To every season has our Father given
Some tokens of his love to us from heaven;
Nor leaves us here, uncheered, to walk alone,
When all we loved and prized in youth have gone.

Let but thy heart go forth to all around,
Still by thy side the beautiful is found;
Along thy path the autumn flowers shall smile,
And to its close lifes pilgrimage beguile.

35'

THE LAMENT OF THE FLOWERS

I looked to find Springs early flowers,
In spots where they were wont to bloom;

But they had perished in their bowers;

The haunts they loved had proved their tomb!

The alder, and the laurel green,

Which sheltered them, had shared their fate;
And but the blackened ground was seen,

Where hid their swelling buds of late.

From the bewildered, homeless bird,

Whose half-built nest the flame destroys,

A low complaint of wrong I heard,
Against the thoughtless, ruthless boys.

Sadly I heard its notes complain,

Ana ask the young its haunts to spare;

Prophetic seemed the sorrowing strain,
Sung oer its home, but late so fair!

"No more with hues like ocean shell

The delicate wind-flower here shall blow;
The spot that loved its form so well
Shall ne'er again its beauty know.

"Or, if it bloom, like some pale ghost

'Twill haunt the black and shadeless dell,
Where once it bloomed a numerous host,
Of its once pleasant bowers to tell.

"And coming years no more shall find

The laurel green upon the hills;
The frequent fire leaves naught behind,
But een the very roots it kills.

35*

"No more upon the turnpikes side

The rose shall shed its sweet perfume;
The travelers joy, the summers pride,
Will share with them a common doom.

"No more shall these returning fling

Round childhood's home a heavenly charm,
With song of bird in early spring,

To glad the heart and save from harm.)f

THE STILL-BORN

I saw one horn, yet he was of the dead;

Long since the spirit ceased to give us birth;
For lust to sin, and sin to death, had led,

And now its children people o'er the earth.

And yet he thought he lived, and as he grew

Looked round upon the world and called it fair;

For of the heaven he lost he never knew,
Though oft he pined in spirit to he there.

And he lived on, the earth became his home,
Nor learnt he aught of those who came before;

For they had ceased to wish from thence to roam,
And for the better land could not deplore.

Time passed, and he was buried; lo! the dust
From which he first was taken him received;

Yet in his dying hour ne'er ceased his trust,

And still his soul for something heavenly grieved.

And we will hope that there is One who gave
The rest he sighed for, but the world denied;

That yet his voice is heard beyond the grave,
That he yet lives who to our vision died.

353

THE WILD ROSE OF PLYMOUTH

Upon the Plymouth shore the -wild rose blooms,
As when the Pilgrims lived beside the hay,
And scents the morning air with sweet perfumes;
Though new this hour> more ancient far than they;
More ancient than the wild, yet friendly race.
That roved the land before the Pilgrims came,
And here for ages found a dwelling-place,
Of whom our histories tell us but a name!
Though new this hour, out from the past it springs,
Telling this summer morning of earth's prime;
And happy visions of the future brings,
That reach beyond, een to the verge of time;
Wreathing earths children in one flowery chain
Of love and beauty, ever to remain.

THE ORIGIN OF MAN

Man has forgot his origin; in vain

He searches for the record of his race

In ancient books, or seeks with toil to gain

From the deep cave, or rocks, some primal trace.

And some have fancied, from a higher sphere,

Forgetful of his origin, he came,

To dwell awhile a wandering exile here,

Subject to sense, another, yet the same.

With mind bewildered, weak, how should he know

The Source Divine from whom his being springs?

The darkened spirit does its shadow throw

On written record and on outward things,

That else might plainly to his thought reveal

The wondrous truths which now they but conceal.

354

THE MORNING WATCH

' Tis near the morning watch: the dim lamp burns,
But scarcely shows how dark the slumbering street;
No sound of life the silent mart returns;
No friends from house to house their neighbors greet.
It is the sleefy of death,— a deeper sleep
Than e'er before on mortal eyelids fell;
No stars above the gloom their places keep;
No faithful watchmen of the morning tell;
Yet still they slumber on, though rising day
Hath through their windows poured the awakening light;
Or, turning in their sluggard trances, say,—
"There yet are many hours to fill the night."
They rise not yet; while on the Bridegroom goes
Till He the day's bright gates forever on them close.

THE PRISON

The prison-house is full; there is no cell
But hath its prisoner laden with his chains;
And yet they live as though their life was well,
Nor of its burdening sin the soul complains;
Thou dost not see where thou hast lived so long,—
The place is called the skull where thou dost tread.
Why laugh' st thou, then, why sing the sportive song,
As if thou livest, and know'st not thou art dead.
Yes, thou art dead, the morn breaks o'er thee now,—
Where is thy Father, He who gave thee birth?
Thou art a severed limb, a barren bough,
Thou sleepest in deep caverns in the earth.
Awake! thou hast a glorious race to run;
Put on thy strength, thou hast not yet begun.

355

YOURSELF

Tis to yourself I speak; you cannot know

Him -whom I call in speaking such a one,

For you beneath the earth lie buried low,

Which he alone as living walks upon:

You may at times have heard him speak to you,

And often wished perchance that you were he;

And I must ever wish that it were true,

And then you could hold fellowship with me:

But now you hear us talk as strangers, met

Above the room wherein you lie abed;

A word perhaps loud spoken you may get,

Or hear our feet when heavily they tread;

But he who speaks, or him who's spoken to,

Must both remain as strangers still to you.

THY FATHER'S HOUSE

Thou art not yet at home; perhaps thy feet

Are on the threshold of thy leathers door,

But still thy journey is not there complete,

If thou canst add to it but one step more;

Tis not thy house which thou with feet can reach,

'Tis where when wearied they will enter not,

But step beneath an earthly roof, where each

May for a time find comfort in his lot;

Then called to wander soon again must mourn

That such frail shelter they should call relief;

And onward seek again that distant bourne,

The home of all the family of grief,

Whose doors by day and night stand open wide,

For all who enter there shall evermore abide.

356

THE CUP

The bitterness of death is on me now,

Before me stands its dark unclosing door;

Yet to Thy will submissive still I bow,

And follow Him who for me went before;

The tomb cannot contain me though I die,

For His strong love awakes its sleeping dead,

And bids them through Himself ascend on high

To Him who is of all the living Head;

1 gladly enter through the gloomy walls,

Where they have passed who loved their Master here;

The voice they heard, to me it onward calls,

And can when faint my sinking spirit cheer;

And from the joy on earth it now has given

Lead on to joy eternal in the heaven.

357

The Anatomy of
Nonsense

PRELIMINARY PROBLEMS

FIRST PROBLEM

Is IT POSSIBLE to say that Poem A (one of Donne's Holy Son-
nets,, or one of the poems of Jonson or of Shakespeare) is better
than Poem B (Collins' Ode to Evening) or vice versa?

If not, is it possible to say that either of these is better than
Poem C (The Cremation of Sam Magee, or something com-
parable)?

If the answer is no in both cases, then any poem is as good as
any other. If this is true, then all poetry is worthless; but this
obviously is not true, for it is contrary to all our experience.

If the answer is yes in both cases, then there follows the ques-
tion of whether the answer implies merely that one poem is better
than another for the speaker, or whether it means that one poem
is intrinsically better than another. If the former, then we are
impressionists, which is to say relativists; and are either mystics of
the type of Emerson, or hedonists of the type of Stevens and
Ransom. If the latter, then we assume that constant principles
govern the poetic experience, and that the poem (as likewise the
judge) must be judged in relationship to those principles. It is
important, therefore, to discover the consequences of assuming
each of these positions.

If our answer to the first question is no and to the second yes,
then we are asserting that we can distinguish between those
poems which are of the canon and those which are not, but
that within the canon all judgment is impossible. This view, if
adopted, will require serious elucidation, for on the face of it, it
appears inexplicable. On the other hand, one cannot deny that

361

within the canon judgment will become more difficult, for the
nearer two poems may be to the highest degrees of excellence,
the harder it will be to choose between them. Two poems, in
fact, might be so excellent that there would be small profit in
endeavoring to say that one was better, but one could arrive at
this conclusion only after a careful examination of both.

SECOND PROBLEM

If we accept the view that one poem can be regarded as better
than another, the question then arises whether this judgment
is a matter of inexplicable intuition, or whether it is a question
of intuition that can be explained, and consequently guided and
improved by rational elucidation.

If we accept the view that the judgment in question is inex-
plicable, then we are again forced to confess ourselves impres-
sionists and relativists, unless we can show that the intuitions of
all men agree at all times, or that the intuitions of one man are
invariably right and those of all others wrong whenever they
differ. We obviously can demonstrate neither of these proposi-
tions,

If we start, then, with the proposition that one poem may be
intrinsically superior to another, we are forced to account for
differences of opinion regarding it. If two critics differ, it is pos-
sible that one is right and the other wrong, more likely that both
are partly right and partly wrong, but in different respects:
neither the native gifts nor the education of any man have ever
been wholly adequate to many of the critical problems he will
encounter, and no two men are ever the same in these respects
or in any others. On the other hand, although the critic should
display reasonable humility and caution, it is only fair to add that
few men possess either the talent or the education to justify their
being taken very seriously, even of those who are nominally pro-
fessional students of these matters.

But if it is possible by rational elucidation to give a more or
less clear account of what one finds in a poem and why one

36*

approves or disapproves, then communication between two
critics, though no doubt imperfect, becomes possible, and it be-
comes possible that they may in some measure correct each other's
errors and so come more near to a true judgment of the poem.

THIRD PROBLEM

If rational communication about poetry is to take place, it is
necessary first to determine what we mean by a poem.

A poem is first of all a statement in words.

But it differs from all such statements of a purely philosoph-
ical or theoretical nature, in that it has by intention a controlled
content of feeling. In this respect, it does not differ from many
works written in prose, however.

A poem differs from a work written in prose by virtue of its
being composed in verse. The rhythm of verse permits the ex-
pression of more powerful feeling than is possible in prose when
such feeling is needed, and it permits at all times the expression
of finer shades of feeling.

A poem, then, is a statement in words in which special pains
arc taken with the expression of feeling. This description is
merely intended to distinguish the poem from other kinds of
writing; it is not offered as a complete description.

FOURTH PROBLEM

What, however, are words?

They arc audible sounds, or their visual symbols, invented
by man to communicate his thoughts and feelings. Each word
has a conceptual content, however slight; each word, exclusive,
perhaps, of the particles, communicates vague associations of
feeling.

The word fire communicates a concept; it also connotes very
vaguely certain feelings, depending on the context in which
we happen to place it— depending, for example, on whether we
happen to think of a fire on a hearth, in a furnace, or in a forest.

363

These feelings may be rendered more and more precise as we
render the context more and more precise; as we come more and
more near to completing and perfecting our poem.

FIFTH PROBLEM

But if the poem, as compared to prose, pays especial attention
to feeling, are we to assume that the rational content of the poem
is unimportant to its success?

The rational content cannot be eliminated from words; con-
sequently the rational content cannot be eliminated from poetry.
It is there. If it is unsatisfactory in itself, a part of the poem is un-
satisfactory; the poem is thus damaged beyond argument. If we
deny this, we must surely explain ourselves very fully.

If we admit this, we are faced with another problem: is it con-
ceivable that rational content and feeling-content may both be
perfect, and yet that they may be unrelated to each other, or im-
perfectly related? To me this is inconceivable, because the emo-
tional content»of words is generated by our experience with the
conceptual content, so that a relationship is necessary.

This fact of the necessity of such relationship may fairly re-
turn us for a moment to the original question: whether imper-
fection of rational content damages the entire poem. If there is a
necessary relationship between concept and feeling, and concept
is unsatisfactory, then feeling must be damaged by way of the
relationship.

SIXTH PROBLEM

If there is a relationship between concept and feeling, what is
the nature of that relationship?

To answer this, let us return to the basic unit, the word. The
concept represented by the word, motivates the feeling which
the word communicates. It is the concept of fire which generates
the feelings communicated by the word, though the sound of the
word may modify these feelings very subtly, as may other acci-
dental qualities, especially if the word be used skillfully in a

364

given context. The accidental qualities of a word, however, such
as its literary history, for example, can only modify, cannot essen-
tially change, for these will be governed ultimately by the con-
cept; that is, fire will seldom be used to signify plum-blossom,
and so will have few opportunities to gather connotations from
the concept, plum-blossom. The relationship, in the poem, be-
tween rational statement and feeling, is thus seen to be that of
motive to emotion.

SEVENTH PROBLEM

But has not this reasoning brought us back to the proposition
that all poems are equally good? For if each word motivates its
own feeling, because of its intrinsic nature, will not any rational
statement, since it is composed of words, motivate the feeling
exactly proper to it?

This is not true, for a good many reasons, of which I shall
enumerate only a few of the more obvious. In making a rational
statement, in purely theoretical prose, we find that our state-
ment may be loose or exact, depending upon the relationships of
the words to each other. The precision of a word depends to some
extent upon its surroundings. This is true likewise with respect
to the connotations of words. Two words, each of which has
several usably close rational synonyms, may reinforce and clarify
each other with respect to their connotations or they may not
do so.

Let me illustrate with a simple example from Browning's
Serenade at the Villa:

So wore night; the East was gray,

White the broad-faced hemlock flowers.

The lines are marred by a crowding of long syllables and difficult
consonants, but they have great beauty in spite of the fault. What
I wish to point out, for the sake of my argument, is the relation-
ship between the words wore and gray. The verb wore means
literally that the night passed, but it carries with it connotations

365

of exhaustion and attrition which belong to the condition of the
protagonist; and grayness is a color which we associate with such
a condition. If we change the phrase to read: "Thus night
passed/* we shall have the same rational meaning, and a meter
quite as respectable, but no trace of the power of the line: the
connotation of wore will be lost, and the connotation of gray will
remain merely in a state of ineffective potentiality. The pro-
tagonist in seeing his feeling mirrored in the landscape is not
guilty of motivating his feeling falsely, for we know his general
motive from the poem as a whole; he is expressing a portion of
the feeling motivated by the total situation through a more or less
common psychological phenomenon. If the poem were such,
however, that we did not know why the night wore instead of
passed, we should have just cause for complaint; in fact, most of
the strength of the word would probably be lost. The second line
contains other fine effects, immediately with reference to the
first line, ultimately with reference to the theme; I leave the reader
to analyze them for himself, but he will scarcely succeed without
the whole poenl before him.

Concepts, as represented by particular words, are affected by
connotations due to various and curious accidents. A word may
gather connotations from its use in folk-poetry, in formal poetry,
in vulgar speech, or in technical prose: a single concept might
easily be represented by four words with these distinct histories;
and any one of the words might prove to be proper in a given
poetic context. Words gain connotation from etymological acci-
dents. Something of this may be seen in the English word out-
rage, in which is commonly felt, in all likelihood, something
associated with rage, although there is no rage whatever in the
original word. Similarly the word urchin, in modern English,
seldom connotes anything related to hedgehogs, or to the familiars
of the witches, by whose intervention the word arrived at its
modern meaning and feeling. Yet the connotation proper to any
stage in the history of such a word might be resuscitated, or a
blend of connotations effected, by skillful use. Further, the con-
notation of a word may be modified very strongly by its function
366

in the metrical structure, a matter which I shall discuss at length
in connection with the theories of Ransom.

This is enough to show that exact motivation of feeling by
concept is not inherent in any rational statement. Any rational
statement will govern the general possibilities of feeling deriv-
able from it, but the task of the poet is to adjust feeling to motive
precisely. He has to select words containing not only the right
relationships within themselves, but the right relationships to
each other. The task is very difficult; and this is no doubt the
reason why the great poetry of a great poet is likely to be very
small in bulk.

EIGHTH PROBLEM

Is it not possible, however, to escape from this relationship of
motive to emotion by confining ourselves very largely to those
words which denote emotion: love, envy, anger, and the like?

This is not possible, for these words, like others, represent
concepts. If we should confine ourselves strictly to such a vocabu-
lary, we should merely write didactic poetry: poetry about love
in general, or about anger in general. The emotion communi-
cated would result from our apprehension of the ideas in ques-
tion. Such poetry is perfectly legitimate, but it is only one kind of
poetry, and it is scarcely the kind which the Romantic theorist
is endeavoring to define.

Such poetry has frequently been rendered particular by the
use of allegory. The playful allegorizing of minor amoristic
themes which one encounters in the Renaissance and which
is possibly descended from certain neo-Platonic elements in
medieval poetry may serve as illustration. Let us consider these
and the subsequent lines by Thomas Lodge:

Love in my bosom like a bee

Doth suck his sweet;
Now with his wings he plays with me,

Now with his feet.

367

Love itself is a very general idea and might include many kinds
of experience; the idea is limited by this allegory to the senti-
mental and sensual, but we still have an idea, the subdivision of
the original idea, and the feeling must be appropriate to the con-
cept. The concept is rendered concrete by the image of Cupid,
whose actions, in turn, are rendered visible by comparison to the
bee: it is these actions which make the poem a kind of anticipa-
tory meditation on more or less sensual love, a meditation which
by its mere tone of expression keeps the subject in its proper place
as a very minor one. Sometimes the emphasis is on the mere
description of the bee, sometimes on the description of Cupid,
sometimes on the lover's feeling; but the feeling motivated in any
passage is governed by this emphasis. The elements, once they
are united in the poem, are never really separated, of course. In
so far as the poet departs from his substantial theme in the direc-
tion of mere bees and flowers, he will achieve what Ransom calls
irrelevance; but if there is much of this the poem will be weak-
ened. Whether he so departs or not, the relation of motive to
emotion must rehiain the same, within each passage. I have dis-
cussed this problem in my essay on Ransom.

A common romantic practice is to use words denoting emo-
tions, but to use them loosely and violently, as if the very careless-
ness expressed emotion. Another is to make a general statement,
but seem to refer it to a particular occasion, which, however, is
never indicated: the poet thus seems to avoid the didactic, yet he
is not forced to understand the particular motive. Both these
faults may be seen in these lines from Shelley:

Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight;

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more— oh, never more.

The poet's intention is so vague, however, that he achieves noth-
ing but stereotypes of a very crude kind.
368

The Romantics often tried other devices. For example, it
would be possible to write a poem on fear in general, but to avoid
in some measure the effect of the purely didactic by illustrating
the emotion along the way with various experiences which might
motivate fear. There is a danger here, though it is merely a danger,
that the general idea may not dominate the poem, and that the
poem may thus fall apart into a group of poems on particular ex-
periences. There is the alternative danger, that the particular
quality of the experiences may be so subordinated to the illustra-
tive function of the experiences, that within each illustration there
is merely a stereotyped and not a real relationship of motive to
feeling: this occurs in Collins' Ode to Fear, though a few lines
in the Epode come surprisingly to life. But the methods which I
have just described really offer no semblance of an escape from
the theory of motivation which I am defending.

Another Romantic device, if it is conscious enough to be called
a device, is to offer instead of a defensible motive a false one,
usually culled from landscape. This kind of writing represents a
tacit admission of the principle of motivation which I am defend-
ing, but a bad application of the principle. It results in the kind
of writing which I have called pseudo-reference in my volume,
Primitivism and Decadence. One cannot believe, for example,
that Wordsworth's passions were charmed away by a look at the
daffodils, or that Shelley's were aroused by the sight of the leaves
blown about in the autumn wind. A motive is offered, and the
poet wants us to accept it, but we recognize it as inadequate. In
such a poem there may be fragments of good description, which
motivate a feeling more or less purely appropriate to the objects
described, and these fragments may sustain our liking for the
poem: this happens in Collins' Ode to Evening; but one will find
also an account of some kind of emotion essentially irrelevant to
the objects described, along with the attempt, more or less ex-
plicit, to deduce the emotion from the object.

There remains the method of the Post-Romantics, whether
French Symbolists or American Experimentalists: the method
of trying to extinguish the rational content of language while

369

retaining the content of association. This method I have dis-
cussed in Primitivism and Decadence, and I shall discuss it again
in this book.

NINTH PROBLEM

The relationship in the poem of rational meaning to feeling we
have seen to be that of motive to emotion; and we have seen that
this must be a satisfactory relationship. How do we determine
whether such a relationship is satisfactory? We determine it by
an act of moral judgment. The question then arises whether
moral judgments can be made, whether the concept of morality
is or is not an illusion.

If morality can be considered real, if a theory of morality can
be said to derive from reality, it is because it guides us toward the
greatest happiness which the accidents of life permit: that is,
toward the fullest realization of our nature, in the Aristotelian or
Thomistic sense. But is there such a thing, abstractly considered,
as full realization of our nature?

To avoid discussion of too great length, let us consider the
opposite question: is there such a thing as obviously unfulfilled
human nature? Obviously there is. We need only turn to the
feeble-minded, who cannot think and so cannot perceive or feel
with any clarity; or to the insane, who sometimes perceive and
feel with great intensity, but whose feelings and perceptions are
so improperly motivated that they are classed as illusions. At
slightly higher levels, the criminal, the dissolute, the unscrupu-
lously selfish, and various types of neurotics are likely to arouse
but little disagreement as examples.

Now if we are able to recognize the fact of insanity— if in fact
we are forced to recognize it— that is, the fact of the obvious mal-
adjustment of feeling to motive, we are forced to admit the pos-
sibility of more accurate adjustment, and, by necessary sequence,
of absolutely accurate adjustment, even though we admit the
likelihood that most people will attain to a final adjustment but
very seldom indeed. We can guide ourselves toward such an

370

adjustment in life, as in art, by means of theory and the critical
examination of special instances; but the final act of judgment is
in both life and art a unique act— it is a relationship between two
elements, the rational understanding and the feeling, of which
only one is classificatory and of which the other has infinite pos-
sibilities of variation.

TENTH PROBLEM

If the final act of adjustment is a unique act of judgment, can
we say that it is more or less right, provided it is demonstrably
within the general limits prescribed by the theory of morality
which has led to it? The answer to this question is implicit in
what has preceded; in fact the answer resembles exactly that
reached at the end of the first problem examined. We can say
that it is more or less nearly right. If extreme deviation from right
judgment is obvious, then there is such a thing as right judgment.
The mere fact that life may be conducted in a fairly satisfactory
manner, by means of inaccurate judgment within certain limits,
and that few people ever bother to refine their judgment beyond
the stage which enables them to remain largely within those
limits, does not mean that accurate judgment has no reality. Im-
plicit in all that has preceded is the concept that in any moral
situation, there is a right judgment as an ultimate possibility; that
the human judge, or actor, will approximate it more or less nearly;
that the closeness of his approximation will depend upon the
accuracy of his rational understanding and of his intuition, and
upon the accuracy of their interaction upon each other.

ELEVENTH PROBLEM

Nothing has thus far been said about human action, yet morality
is supposed to guide human action. And if art is moral, there
should be a relationship between art and human action.

The moral judgment, whether good, bad, or indifferent, is
commonly the prelude and instigation to action. Hastily or care-

371

fully, intelligently or otherwise, one arrives at some kind of
general idea of a situation calling for action, and one's idea moti-
vates one's feeling: the act results. The part played by will, or the
lack of it, between judgment and act, the possibility that action
may be frustrated by some constitutional or habitual weakness
or tendency, such as cowardice or a tendency to anger, in a per-
son of a fine speculative or poetic judgment, are subjects for a
treatise on ethics or psychology; a treatise on poetry stops with
the consideration of the speculative judgment, which reaches its
best form and expression in poetry. In the situations of daily life,
one does not, as a rule, write a poem before acting: one makes a
more rapid and simple judgment. But if the poem does not
individually lead to a particular act, it does not prevent action. It
gives us a better way of judging representative acts than we
should otherwise have. It is thus a civilizing influence: it trains
our power of judgment, and should, I imagine, affect the quality
of daily judgments and actions*

TWELFTH PROBLEM

What, then, is the nature of the critical process^

It will consist (1) of the statement of such historical or bio-
graphical knowledge as may be necessary in order to understand
the mind and method of the writer; (2) of such analysis of his
literary theories as we may need to understand and evaluate what
he is doing; (3) of a rational critique of the paraphrasable con-
tent (roughly, the motive) of the poem; (4) of a rational critique
of the feeling motivated— that is, of the details of style, as seen
in language and technique; and (5) of the final act of judgment,
a unique act, the general nature of which can be indicated, but
which cannot be communicated precisely, since it consists in re-
ceiving from the poet his own final and unique judgment of his
matter and in judging that judgment. It should be noted that the
purpose of the first four processes is to limit as narrowly as pos-
sible the region in which the final unique act is to occur.

In the actual writing of criticism, a given task may not require
all of these processes, or may not require that all be given equal

37*

emphasis; or it may be that in connection with a certain writer,
whether because of the nature of the writer or because of the
way in which other critics have treated him previously, one or
two of these processes must be given so much emphasis that
others must be neglected for lack of space. These are practical
matters to be settled as the occasions arise.

373

HENRY ADAMS
or The Creation of Confusion

I. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

HENRY ADAMS saw modern history as a progress from unified
understanding, or the illusion of such, in the century following
the year 1150, toward the dispersion of understanding and force
in the twentieth century; and he saw himself as the product of
an earlier New England. In regard to himself he was correct;
and as for modern history, his view of it, though scarcely defen-
sible, provides a clue to certain historical processes of which the
history of New England is perhaps the most dramatic single
illustration.

The history immediately relevant to an understanding of
Adams' mind might be said to begin with the first great theo-
logical critics of Aquinas, especially with Ockham. Aquinas
endeavored as far as possible to establish a separation between
philosophy and theology; philosophy was guided by natural rea-
son, theology was derived from Revelation. But he believed that
philosophical knowledge was possible, and in his pursuit of it, he
composed the most complete and lucid critique of previous
philosophy that had been made, and the most thorough and
defensible moral and philosophical system, in all likelihood, that
the world has known.

Ockham, the most profound of the medieval nominalists,
struck at the very heart of this philosophy by attacking the reality
of universals, by endeavoring to show the illusory nature of all

374

ideas whatsoever. Etienne Gilson has described the immediate
results as follows:1

Thus blended together, Empiricism and theologism made a most
explosive combination. At the top of the world, a God whose abso-
lute power knew no limits, not even those of a stable nature en-
dowed with a necessity and an intelligibility of its own. Between
His will and the countless individuals that co-exist in space or suc-
ceed each other and glide away in time, there was strictly nothing.
Having expelled from the mind of God the intelligible world of
Plato, Ockham was satisfied that no intelligibility could be found in
any one of God's works. How could there be order in nature, when
there is no nature? And how could there be a nature when each
singular being, thing, or event, can claim no other justification for
its existence than that of being one among the elect of an all-powerful
God? That was not the God of theology, but of theologism; for
though the living God of theology be infinitely more than the
"Author of Nature/' He is at least that, whereas Ockham's God was
not even that. Instead of being an eternal source of that concrete
order of intelligibility and beauty, which we call nature, Ockham's
God was expressly intended to relieve the world of the necessity
of having any meaning of its own. The God of theology always
vouches for nature; the jealous God of theologism usually prefers to
abolish it.

The universe of Ockham here described bears a precise resem-
blance, as we shall eventually see, to the universe of Henry
Adams, with this exception: that in the universe of Henry Adams
there is no God. In the universe of Ockham, all morality and
moral knowledge, or what we call such, are independent of
nature, and depend directly from the arbitrary will of God; and
had that will chanced to be otherwise, they would then have
been otherwise. We have no way of obtaining knowledge of man
through the study of man; we are the recipients of arbitrary in-
structions which we disobey at our peril. In the universe of
Aquinas, which resembles in many important respects that of his
great predecessor, Aristotle, we can learn a great deal by the light

1 The Unity of Philosophical Experience, by Etienne Gilson, Scribners, 1937.
P. 85.

375

of natural reason. The universe was created by God, it is true; but
it was so created as to pursue its own laws, and those laws, includ-
ing many which govern the nature of man, can be discovered
with reasonable accuracy after careful examination of the data
before us. The risk which Ockham ran is clearly stated by
Gilson:2

Different as they may be, owing to the various times, places and
civilizations in which they were conceived, these doctrines resemble
each other at least in this, that all of them are thoroughly intoxi-
cated with a definite religious feeling which I beg leave to call, for
simplicity's sake, the feeling of the Glory of God. Needless to say,
there is no true religion without that feeling. The deeper it is, the
better it is; but it is one thing to experience a certain feeling deeply,
and another thing to allow it to dictate, uncontrolled by reason, a
completely rounded interpretation of the world. When and where
piety is permitted to inundate the philosophical field, the usual out-
come is that, the better to extol the Glory of God, pious-minded
theologians proceed joyfully to annihilate God's own creation. God
is great and high and almighty; what better proof could be given
of these 'truths than that nature and man are essentially insignifi-
cant, low and utterly powerless creatures? A very dangerous method
indeed, for in the long run it is bound to hurt both philosophy and
religion. In such a case the sequence of doctrines too often runs in
the following way: with the best intentions in the world, some
theologian suggests, as a philosophically established truth, that God
is and does everything, while nature and man are and do nothing;
then comes a philosopher who grants the theologian's success in
proving that nature is powerless, but emphasizes his failure to prove
that there is a God. Hence the logical conclusion that nature is
wholly deprived of reality and intelligibility. This is scepticism, and
it cannot be avoided in such cases. Now one can afford to live on
philosophical scepticism, so long as it is backed by a positive re-
ligious faith; yet, even while our faith is there, one still remains a
sceptic in philosophy, and were faith ever to go, what would be left
of us but an absolute sceptic?

Once a more or less Ockhamist position is taken, there are
various ways by which faith may be lost, as one can discover by
examining the history of European thought from the time of

2 Ibid. pp. 37-8.
376

Ockham to the present. Moreover, Ockham was by no means the
inventor of the general religious position which he took; he was
merely the last of its great defenders, and as a logician the greatest
of them. The type of Christianity to place faith, which results
from an act of the will made possible by Divine Grace, above
understanding, has its first great exponent in Augustine, but is
older than Augustine. This type of Christianity, the fideistic, or
voluntaristic, derives all knowledge from faith and Revelation,
and refuses to take the natural reason seriously; and although
some voluntarists are willing to argue rationally from Revelation,
their theology leads commonly and rapidly to a daily dependence
upon Grace and distrust of reason— that is, to extreme mysticism.
Aquinas was a sane enough man to wish to make the most of all
his faculties, and a good enough Christian to believe that God
had given him his faculties for use.

The voluntaristic tradition seems to have grown upon Chris-
tianity of all kinds since the fifteenth century, but especially
upon the western churches severed from Rome. Voluntarism
is an easy form of Christianity for those who arc not vigorous
intellectually but who are slow to give up old habits, and it may
for this reason have gained upon the Church of England and
upon the Episcopal Church in the United States, churches in
which faith seems to have died so slowly and gently that its
demise is only half suspected today.3 It was in Calvinism, how-
ever, that voluntarism received its logical expression, and it was
in New England that Calvinism was able to work out its own
natural development with less interference or outside influence
than was possible anywhere in Europe.

The Calvinistic doctrines were all doctrines that should have
followed naturally from the position taken by Ockham: the doc-
trine of predestination, or the arbitrary separation from all eter-
nity of the few to be saved from the many to be damned; the
doctrine of God's Decrees, or the predestination from all eternity
of every event, to the falling of the last leaf; the doctrine of justi-

3 One of the many amusing comments which I have heard attributed to the
late David Starr Jordan goes somewhat as follows: "The Episcopal Church is
so constituted that its members can really believe anything; but of course almost
none of them do."

377

fication by faith alone; the doctrine, closely allied to the last, of
the inefficaciousness of good works; and the doctrine of Grace as
an experience essentially mystical and almost melodramatic in its
violence.

Yet the Christians of the Reformation, in spite of their anti-
moral theology, were extremely moral people; and the Refor-
mation itself was in a large measure a protest against the abuses
which had grown up in the Roman Church during a period of
decadence. One needed courage, both physical and moral, to go
with Luther and Calvin; and of those who believed with the
reformers in England, perhaps the most convinced, the most
indomitably moral, were those who went into the wilderness
rather than compromise their convictions.

But their morality remained fideistic. Good works were good,
not because of their intrinsic worth, but because God had arbi-
trarily termed them so; good works were the fruits of faith, but
could accomplish nothing in themselves; and faith was the arbi-
trary gift^of God, which only a few would receive. Works appar-
ently good, but performed by those not of the elect, were a
delusion. And yet in most Calvinistic systems, and by nearly all
Calvinistic preachers, man was held morally responsible to God
for his behavior. The Calvinists, in refusing to distinguish, with
Aquinas, between the ideas of Divine prescience and Divine pre-
destination, which was purely a philosophical matter, found
themselves confronted with the very practical conflict between
the ideas of predestination and of man's moral responsibility for
his acts. The wiser Calvinistic writers have admitted that the
ideas are logically incompatible with each other and have said
that the conflict is a mystery understood by God alone; but the
New England Calvinists, in the isolation of their new commu-
nity, endeavored all too often to argue their way free; and the re-
sult was the destruction of theology. Since the philosophic under-
standing of morality was essentially lost in their tradition, the
source of it having been renounced, the death of theology, which
alone could give authority for moral principles or behavior, was a
very serious matter; and it was the more serious because New

378

England Calvinism had generated in its adherents very intense
moral habits.

These habits, as I have indicated, must have been very strong
in the founders of Massachusetts, and the continuation of them
may have been in part merely the biological inheritance of a con-
stitutional tendency; but the situation in Massachusetts must
have done much to perpetuate and strengthen them. The New
Englanders, as predestinarians, believed that they had been sent
into a new land to found a pure church; not only were they the
elect of God, but they represented the ultimate and predestined
culmination of Christian history, which in turn was the predes-
tined triumph of all preceding human history: these simple men
in a struggle for life against the wilderness represented the dra-
matic victory of religion, toward which God had ordained the
progress of the world. This view was seriously taken, and it was
seriously expressed at the time by many writers; the reader may
examine it in its completeness in Cotton Mather's Introduction
to the Magnolia Christi Americana, an Introduction of which
the opening recalls the opening of the Aeneid, and which sets
out to summarize the matter of the Christian epic:

I write the Wonders of the Christian Religion, flying from the
depravations of Europe, to the American Strand: and, assisted by
the Holy Author of that Religion, I do, with all conscience of
Truth, required therein by Him, who is the Truth itself, report the
wonderful displays of His infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, and
Faithfulness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath irradiated an
Indian Wilderness.

The morality of these men may have been in fact merely
habitual, but in theory it was predestined and arbitrary, as I
have said. It did not derive, theoretically, from an understand-
ing of human nature and a desire to improve human nature
by careful and enlightened modification. It derived from the
arbitrary will of God: God had given a few simple commands
for behavior, and they were to be obeyed simply and literally.
The theology employed by the 17th century church in New

379

England modified original Calvinism in certain important re-
spects; the most important being with reference to the signs of
election. The importance of the mystical experience was mini-
mized; in its place was encouraged the belief that a man might
know himself one of the elect when he decided to enter the
church and conform to its principles. The doctrine of predesti-
nation was not altered by this belief, for the decision, apparently
an act of the private will, had been predestined.

Every human act thus became a sign in an allegory, as did
every event in nature. If a man sinned, it was fairly obvious
that he was an evil man and one of the damned, in spite of the
theoretic but negligible possibility that he might be predestined
to a later repentance and ultimate salvation. The most insignifi-
cant events were predetermined by God in accordance with His
eternal plan: by a cast of the dice one might discover God's will,
for the fall of the dice was predestined; though it is hard in these
later days to understand why confirmed predcstinarians should
ever have required the intervention of the dice, when they had
renounced with abhorrence the intervention of the Ghurch of
Rome.

Further, until the time of Andros, the church ruled the state;
and it was not until the charter of 1692 that there was any real
relaxation of the theory that the church had a right to do so,
and the relaxation, when it came, was merely the slow beginning
of a long process. The result was the fixing of certain social and
mental habits, stronger, in all probability, than any others which
have ever permeated a society at all its levels. Morality was
strong, simple, and arbitrary; and under the influence of the
doctrine of predestination, it transformed the human mind into
an allegorical machine. One can open the diary of Cotton
Mather almost at random and verify this assertion: people en
countered casually on the street, the vicissitudes of private ex-
perience, a dog urinating # a wall, were signs which Mather
read for their divine meaning. And one can verify the assertion
in innumerable minor documents of the time. This allegorism
was not a literary movement or device, such as one meets among
the neo-Platonists in various periods; nor was it the property of
380

an academic class, like the medieval realism which expressed it-
self in a somewhat less allegorical allegory than that of the Puri-
tans, for example in that of Dante; nor was it a pedagogic device
for instructing the illiterate, such as one meets at the lower levels
of medieval literature, doubtless as a result of the influence of
the realists; it was a form of the mind in daily life, a way of seeing
the universe, which appears to have been common to an entire
society, and it persisted well into the nineteenth century, after
the ideas which had given rise to it had long since passed away.
The works of Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and Henry
Adams are its belated fruits in literature; in fact the diary of
Cotton Mather and the Education of Henry Adams offer one
of the most curious cases of similar temperaments that one is
ever likely to find in two literary periods so far apart.

By the end of the 17th century, New England Calvinism
was disintegrating, especially along the Massachusetts seaboard;
and about 1733 there began in the parish of Jonathan Edwards
a revival of Calvinism, which, under the, influence of several
powerful, though but vaguely Calvinistical field-preachers, was
to sweep New England within the next few years. The excite-
ment of this movement resulted in the breaking off of many small
and strangely inspired sects from the main Calvinistic body; but
it resulted also in the establishment of a revised and renewed
Calvinism, under the guidance of Edwardian theology.

Edwardian theology abandoned the early New England modi-
fications of Calvinism; it taught an undisguised determinism and
a purely mystical doctrine of Grace. New England mystical
tendencies had by no means been suppressed by the earlier doc-
trine: there had been doctrinal heretics, and even among the
orthodox, such as Increase and Cotton Mather, there had been
mystical trances, ecstasies, and visions, Cotton Mather, in fact,
having been visited by an angel during one of the sunlit morn-
ings of his youth. But Edwards revived and encouraged this
tendency by explicit doctrine; and the New Englander's capacity
for mystical belief and feeling was thus carried over to the period
when Emerson should redescribe the mystical experience, em-

ploying the ideas of Romantic pantheism recently imported from
the literary movements of Europe, and as far as might be the
language of Edwardian Calvinism, so that Romantic doctrine
was offered in a language carrying most of the emotional im
plications of the New England religious tradition in its most
intense aspects. Mind and matter, God and Creation were one;
the inundation of the mind by instinct and emotion was Divine
Grace; and surrender to whim was surrender to the Spirit. Whit
man restated this doctrine in a vulgar style, and increased its
popularity; William James did much to give it academic re-
spectability; and it reached its final and dramatic fulfillment in
the life and work of Hart Crane. The mystical tradition would
appear to have had little influence upon Adams at the beginning,
but as we shall ultimately see, he drew very near to it in the
later years of his life.

But Edwards had little influence along the seaboard: the
churches there continued their process of breaking down the
17th cehtury theology which they had long since begun. The
moral sense proved stronger than the belief in predestination,
and with the disappearance of the doctrine of predestination
went most of what was precise and strong in Calvinistic theol-
ogy. Certainly the doctrine of predestination was the essential
element in Calvinism; and when that went, theology was gone,
for the ancient and habitual antagonism to Romanism, Angli
canism and Arminianism remained when the doctrinal justifi-
cation for it was dead: there were a few apostates to Anglican-
ism, such as the American Samuel Johnson, but in general the
New Englander was incapable even of thinking of a Christianity
antecedent to Calvin. Whatever the intellectual troubles of the
New Englander, he was the creature of the strongest habits that
the world had ever seen.

The result was Unitarianism. Among the Unitarian and re-
lated churches of the early nineteenth century there was a good
deal of variation in doctrine, but the tendency was toward a
belief in a benevolent God, in place of the angry God of the
fathers; in Christ as a moral teacher, and not as the son of God;

382

in freedom of the will; in the complete efficaciousness of good
works. And there was an increasing tendency toward disbelief
in eternal damnation. Unitarianism placed man's responsibility
for his acts and his salvation wholly within himself, but the
acts of a well-bred man conformed almost inevitably to the strong
customs of the society which had been generated by the earlier
ideas; so that between the ease with which one might be moral
and the gentlemanly attitude of God, salvation appeared a fairly
simple matter. This period produced a type of mind which we
may still observe in the poetry of Bryant, and in the prose of
Prescott and of the first Charles Francis Adams: able, dignified,
and at times distinguished; governed easily by firm convictions;
uncritical of accepted principles; and tending to substitute gen-
eral stereotypes for precise perceptions and ideas. Men of this
type adopted easily and turned to their own purposes the literary
style produced by English deism, a style composed of somewhat
vaguely general ideas, of an easy and well-constkructed period,
and of the highly generalized statement which tended at its
best toward the aphorism, at its weakest toward the clich£.
Thanatopsis is a sound poem and a serious and moving one;
and rhetorically it is a masterpiece. But as compared even to so
simple a piece as Herbert's Church Monuments, it displays a
very simple and generalized grasp of its subject; and the same
comments may be made upon Byrant's best work throughout—
To a Waterfowl, The Battlefield, The Grave, and The Tides.

It was the Unitarians who provided the immediate back-
ground of Henry Adams, and he described their mentality on
many occasions, and always with bewilderment. In the history
he writes:4

No more was heard of the Westminster doctrine that man had
lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation,
but was dead in sin. So strong was the reaction against old dogmas
that for thirty years society seemed less likely to resume the ancient
faith in the Christian Trinity, than to establish a new Trinity in
which a deified humanity should have a place. Under the influence

'History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and
Madison, by Henry Adams. Albert and Charles Boni, 1930. Vol. IX, pp. 182-3.

383

of Channing and his friends, human nature was adorned with vir-
tues hardly suspected before, and with hopes of perfection on earth
altogether strange to theology. The Church then charmed. The
worth of man became under Channing's teachings a source of pride
and joy, with such insistence as to cause his hearers at last to recall,
almost with a sense of relief, that the Saviour himself had been con-
tent to regard them only as of more value than many sparrows.

And a few lines below, he adds of the doctrine of Hosea
Ballou:

This new doctrine, which took the name of Universalism, held
as an article of faith "that there is one God, whose nature is love,
revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one Holy Spirit of Grace, who
will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and
happiness/' In former times anyone who had publicly professed
belief in universal salvation would not have been regarded as a
Christian. . . . Yet the Universalists steadily grew in numbers and
respectability, spreading from State to State under Ballou's guid-
ance. . . .

It is their bland security that most puzzles Adams, as it may
well puzzle us today. In the Education he writes:5

Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the
Unitarian clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character, moral
and intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston,
who controlled society and Harvard College, were never excelled.
They proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on no doctrine,
but taught, or tried to teach, the means of leading a virtuous, use-
ful, unselfish life, which they held to be sufficient for salvation. For
them difficulties might be ignored; doubts were waste of thought;
nothing exacted solution. Boston had solved the universe; or had
offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was
worked out.

And in the History he quotes a passage from Channing which
illustrates this view, and comments upon it:6

6 The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams, Modern Library Edi-
tion, p. 34.
6 Op. cit. Vol. IX, pp. 181-2.

384

"We lay it down as a great and indisputable opinion, clear as the
sun at noon-day, that the great end for which Christian truth is re-
vealed is the sanctification of the soul, the formation of the Chris-
tian character; and wherever we see the marks of this character
displayed in a professed disciple of Jesus, we hope and rejoice to
hope, that he has received all the truth which is necessary to his
salvation." The hope might help to soothe anxiety and distress,
but it defied conclusions reached by the most anxious and often
renewed labors of churchmen for eighteen hundred years. Some-
thing more than a hope was necessary as the foundation of a faith.

This was, however, the last step possible to a voluntaristic
Christianity which should remain non-mystical. Dogmas were
ignored as misleading and vicious; theology was so simplified
that one could scarcely identify the God in whom one believed.
But belief remained, and one's entire theory of human nature,
or rather of human conduct, depended arbitrarily but historically
and helplessly from that belief. As long as the belief remained,
the spiritual result was a kind of placid security; but the New
Englander retained his need for security, and wherever the be-
lief departed and the evidence is still available for examination,
we commonly find a kind of willed confusion and religious hor-
ror, best represented in literature by Melville's Pierre and The
Confidence Man and by the later work of Henry Adams.

The strength of the voluntaristic tradition may be observed
in a New Englander of our own period, the late Irving Babbitt.
Babbitt found that human nature functioned at three levels,
to use his own figure: the naturalistic, which was the level of
the emotions and instincts, and which had been exploited by
the writers of the Romantic movement; the humanistic, or criti-
cal, at which we are able to examine the lower level, understand
it, and control it; and the religious, which is above criticism.
In his most valuable book, Rousseau and Romanticism, he de-
votes himself primarily to the criticism of Romantic principles
from what he calls a humanistic position, and he refers to him-
self as an Aristotelian. The book is marred by his reference to
the "Inner Check," or conscience, a feeling which functions at

385

the religious level; but I believe that this element can be dis-
sected out with no great damage to the criticism of the Romantic
movement.

In his later work, however, his religious doctrines become
more important, and in the book entitled On Being Creative,
he asserts the absolute primacy of the will: man must will to
submit his private will to the higher will, in which he must
believe, and from that act understanding can follow; and the
Inner Check, or Conscience, the feeling superior to reason and
which guides us in emergencies, is identified with Divine Grace.
This is Augustinism without the Christianity: we must believe
in that which is superior to reason and which we therefore can-
not define, much less examine critically; and in that which is
divorced from any particular historical tradition such as that
which still, I suppose, supports the belief of the Christian. And
we have as our ultimate guide an emotional experience which
is above rational criticism: the practical question therefore arises
as to how we shall distinguish between an experience which is
above criticism and one which is fairly subject to it, if we can-
not bring criticism properly to bear on the first. Babbitt's final
position seems to be little better than a starting point for a short-
cut back to Emersonian mysticism.

Babbitt believed the Inner Check to be a psychological fact,
observable and therefore a fit beginning for discussion. But the
question remains as to the exact nature of the fact. The feeling
which is called conscience in Protestant and post-Protestant so-
ciety is presumably real; but when Aquinas comes to define
conscience, he identifies it with reason, and he discusses the
moral consequences of the identification at great length. From
a Thomistic position, there would always remain the possibility
of divine intervention in a particular instance; but the Catholic
Christian, whether Thomistic or other, would be protected
against error by the supervision of the Church, a supervision
which Babbitt did not enjoy: and this supervision is, in theory,
the supervision of the disinterested reason.

But Aquinas would be forced, I believe, by his definition
of conscience and by his use of the Aristotelian doctrine of
386

habit, to identify Babbitt's Inner Check in most of its individual
occurrences as an habitual way of feeling about certain kinds of
acts; the habit having been generated by training in a particular
kind of society, which in turn had grown up originally in con-
formity with certain kinds of ideas. There is nothing in Babbitt
to make one relinquish this interpretation, or even to make one
believe that he suspected the possibility of this interpretation;
and if the interpretation is true, it follows, as various critics have
suggested, that the Inner Check will become progressively
weaker as the generating ideas tend less and less to acceptance
and the society in consequence alters its nature. Babbitt's doc-
trine of the Inner Check appears to be a late expression of the
voluntaristic belief that morality is arbitrary and incomprehen-
sible; the exact reverse of the Aristotelian doctrine, by which
Babbitt appears to be mainly influenced in his early work, that
morality is a fair subject for philosophical and psychological in-
vestigation, and that its principles can be discovered in a large
measure through the use of the natural reason in the study of
nature.

I should like also to cite the instance of Henry James, for
his connections with Adams are immediate and important. In
my essay on James,7 I have shown that the character in the
Jamesian novel is guided by a moral sense, or habit, which,
though very intense, has lost its connections with its origins,
so that it is never adequately guided by any critical apparatus,
and that a good deal of obscurity results directly from this situ-
ation in many of the novels. The interesting thing about James
as a critic is that he appears to be in precisely the same predica-
ment as the characters in his novels. He objects to various con-
tinental writers for their lack of moral sense, and he criticizes
many of his own books for the obscurity of their motivation,
an obscurity which, though he realizes the fact imperfectly,
results from the confusion of his own moral sense; but when
he discusses the general principles of fiction,8 he derides the

7 See page 300 of this volume.

8 The references are to The Art of Fiction, in Partial Portraits. It is early,
but characteristic.

387

idea that morality has anything to do with fiction, yet he insists
that fiction "must take itself seriously/' is obliged "really to
represent life"; he takes it for granted "that some incidents are
intrinsically much more important than others/' although a few
lines further, he is willing to grant the artist any subject and
judge him only by what he does with it.

His terms, when he goes behind the terms relating to the
technical structure of the novel, -are extremely confused; but
he insists that the novel shall be interesting. And when we
have read a great deal of his criticism, we discover that he means
that it must be interesting to Henry James; and to discover the
meaning of this interest, we must first come to understand Henry
James, which we can best do through the study of his novels.
Ultimately he demands that the novel display (in a very finished
form, naturally) the particular moral sense, or feeling for human
motivation, which he himself possesses. This moral sense is the
product of New England and of a very special section of history;
and it has lost all connection with its intellectual sources, merely
existing, more and more precariously, in vacuo; but James as-
sumes it to be, if not universal, at least a standard universally
applicable, so that he is in about the same situation as the later
Babbitt.

Adams possessed the same moral sense, in a very exasperated
form. He knew that he had it, and he knew that it closely re-
sembled that of James; but unlike James, he felt that it needed
justification, either philosophical or religious, and he convinced
himself that neither was possible. Before proceeding to an ex-
amination of Adams' thought and art, I wish to cite a few of
his references to James, for they will illuminate a great deal of
that which is to follow.

In 1903 Adams wrote to James after reading James's life of
Story:9

More than ever, after devouring your William Story, I feel how
difficult a job was imposed on you. It is a tour de force, of course,

9 Letters of Henry Adams 1 892-1 91 8, edited by W. C. Ford. Houghton
Mifflin, 1938, p. 414.

188

but that you knew from the first. Whether you have succeeded or
not, I cannot say, because it all spreads itself out as though I had
written it, and I feel where you are walking on firm ground, and
where you are on thin ice, as though I were in your place. Verily
I believe I wrote it. Except your specialty of style, it is me.

The painful truth is that all of my New England generation,
counting the half-century, 1820-1870, were in actual fact only one
mind and nature; the individual was a facet of Boston. We knew
each other to the last nervous center, and feared each other's knowl-
edge. We looked through each other like microscopes. There was
absolutely nothing in us that we did not understand merely by
looking in the eye.10 There was hardly a difference even in depth,
for Harvard College and Unitarianism kept us all shallow. We
knew nothing— no! but really nothing! of the world. One cannot
exaggerate the profundity of ignorance of Story in becoming a
sculptor, or Stunner in becoming a Statesman, or Emerson in be-
coming a philosopher. Story and Sumncr, Emerson and Alcott,
Lowell and Longfellow, Ilillard, Winthrop, Motley, Prcseott, and
all the rest, were the same mind,— and so, poor worm!— was I!

Type bourgeois-boston ien! A type quite as good as another, but
more uniform. What you say of Stow is at bottom exactly what
you would say of Lowell, Motley, and Sumner, barring degrees
of egotism. You cannot help smiling at them, but you smile at us
all equally. God knows that we knew our want of knowledge! the
self-distrust became introspection— nervous self-consciousness— irrita-
ble dislike of America, and antipathy to Boston. Audi ich war in
Arcadlen geborenl

So you have written not Story's life, but your own and mine-
pure autobiography— the more keen for what is beneath, implied,
intelligible only to me, and half a dozen other people still living;
like Frank Boott: who knew our Boston, London, and Rome in
the fifties and sixties. You make me curl up like a trodden-on
worm. Improvised Europeans we were, and— Lord God!— how thin!
No, but it is too cruel! Long ago,— at least thirty years ago,— I dis-
covered it, and have painfully held my tongue about it. You strip
us gently and kindly, like a surgeon, and I feel your knife in my
ribs.

10 It is amusing to compare this statement with the statement of Dallas Archer
to his father, near the end of The Age of Innocence: "You never did ask each
other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just
sat and watched each other, ana guessed at what was going on underneath. A
deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more
about each other's thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own."

389

In 1901 he had written to Elizabeth Cameron:11

Harry James has upset me. John Hay has been greatly troubled
by Harry's last volume, The Sacred Fount. He cannot resist the
suspicion that it is very close on extravagance. His alarm made
me read it, and I recognized at once that Harry and I had the
same disease, the obsession of idee fixe. . . .

In 1908 he wrote to William James of his own Education:1'2

As for the volume, it interests me chiefly as a literary experi-
ment, hitherto, as far as I know, never tried or never successful.
Your brother Harry tries such experiments in literary art daily,
and would know instantly what I mean; but I doubt whether
a dozen people in America— except architects or decorators— would
know or care.

And in 1916, on learning of the death of this friend and alter-
ego, he wrote to Elizabeth Cameron : 18

Today the death of Harry James makes me feel the need of a
let-up; I must speak to some one, and here I have no one Jamesian
to talk to, except Wendell Holmes, and I never see him, for he is
like me in avoiding contemporaries. Harry's death hits me harder
than any stroke since my brother Charles' death a year ago. Not
only was he a friend of mine for more than forty years, but he also
belonged to the circle of my wife's set long before I knew him or
her, and you know how I have clung to all that belonged to my
wife. Swallow, sister! sweet sister swallow! indeed and indeed, we
were really happy then.

II. THE THEORY OF HISTORY

Adams' theory of history is really a philosophy and a theory
of human nature; it is wholly indefensible and perverse, and
we should be hard pressed to understand how a man of genius
could conceive it if we had not some understanding of the history

11 Letters of Henry Adams, op. cit., p. 333.
"Ibid. p. 490.
"Ibid. p. 638.

39°

which is largely responsible for his state of mind. Briefly, he
possessed the acute moral sense of New England to which 1
have already referred and the New Englander's need to read
the significance of every event which he saw. But he was of the
Ockhamist tradition; and as for the Mathers, so for him, the
significance could not reside within the event but must reside
back of it. He would scarcely have put it this way, and he might
have denied the paternity of Ockham; but he belonged to a
moral tradition which had taken its morality wholly on faith
for so long that it had lost the particular kind of intelligence and
perception necessary to read the universe for what it is; and had
developed instead a passion to read the universe for what it
means, as a system of divine shorthand or hieroglyphic, as a
statement of ultimate intentions.

He had no faith, however, and hence he could not believe
that there was anything back of the event: the event was merely
isolated and impenetrable. Yet he possessed the kind of mind
which drove him to read every event with a kind of allegorical
precision; and since every event was isolated and impenetrable,
he read in each new event the meaning that the universe is
meaningless. Meaning had been a function of faith; and faith
had been faith not only in God and his decalogue but in a
complete cosmology and chronology, that is, in all of Revela-
tion; and if any part of this system was injured, every part was
destroyed. The discoveries of geologists and astronomers caused
him indescribable suffering and made it utterly impossible that
he should examine dispassionately the moral nature of man.

I shall deal later with Adams' view of the Middle Ages, thus
reversing his chronology. He saw the twentieth century as an
age of multiplicity or chaos, in which man was forced to recog-
nize the c